Image: Virginia Woolf 1927

Description: Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole (10 x 15 centimeters). This is a picture from one of Virginia Woolf's own photo albums at Monk's House which were acquired at an auction at Sotheby's in 1982 (cf. Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, p. 187), gifted in 1983 by Frederick R. Koch to the Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Libray, Harvard University, and afterwards scanned and uploaded by the library. The Guide published by the library describes collectively the photographs in the album as "snapshots possibly taken by Virginia Woolf or by her friends and family". When the Harvard librarians know who took the picture, they generally indicate it (e.g. Man Ray for this one). This particular photograph is simply described as "Woolf Virginia [1927]". The verso of the photograph bears no mention allowing an identification of the photographer, but simply indicates - faintly pencilled - the portrait has been made in London (see file:Virginia Woolf 1927 verso detail.png). The photograph is reproduced here without any copyright indication and on the cover of Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy by Holly Henry (Cambridge University Press, 2003) with the following credit : "Studio photograph of Virginia Woolf (c. 1927) reprinted by permission of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College" (p. XII) [, the Smith College having been presented by Esther Cloudman Dunn another print of the same picture]. The photograph was, according to the Smith College Library's web site, "used for promotion" by Harcourt Brace, the publisher of the American version of To the Lighthouse in 1927. In Virginia Woolf Icon (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Brenda Silver describes the photograph as an "(unidentified) studio photograph" and comments it "appear[ed] in in an number of Harcourt Brace ads and articles about Woolf and/or her works in the States during the late 1920s ans the 1930s" (p. 132). It was in particular published with no copyright notice in a review of the book published by The New York Times on May 8, 1927 and another review published by The Bookshelf Review in June 1927. The photograph was exhibited in the show Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2014 with the following caption : "by Unknown photographer, 1927. Courtesy of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts".
Title: Virginia Woolf 1927
Credit: Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Author: Unknown
Usage Terms: Public domain
License: Public domain
Attribution Required?: No