Jul 15, 2021 - Sale 2576

Sale 2576 - Lot 89

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941) and her father; Photograph

Photographic portrait of the author and Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) taken by George Charles Beresford (1864-1938) in 1902; the two subjects looking in the same direction, with Woolf in a three-quarter view, her father in profile; with Beresford's 20 Yeoman's Row Brompton Road stamp on the verso of the mount, sepia-toned platinotype on paper, mounted to the original khaki-colored board along the top edge verso of the photograph; chipped with loss to bottom left corner of the image, some very narrow marginal surface loss along top and bottom edges; the image 4 1/4 x 6 in.; the mount 8 x 6 1/4 in.

Woolf's relationship with her father was fraught. She speculated that he "would have blushed with pride," when she was offered the same Clark lectureship in 1932 that he held in 1883, and she also noted that had he lived longer, "his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, not books;-- inconceivable." (See Hill, Katherine C. "Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution." PMLA, vol. 96, no. 3, 1981, pp. 351–362. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/461911. Accessed 12 Apr. 2021.)