Lot 64: HARDY, THOMAS (1840-1928, poet and novelist, O.M.)

PORTRAIT BY OLIVE EDIS (1876-1955),
photograph, platinum print, three-quarter length, seated holding a volume of poetry, signed and inscribed for Siegfried Sassoon by Hardy on the mount 'To Siegfried Sassoon from Thomas Hardy Nov. 1918', blind stamp in roundel of the photographer Olive Edis on the mount, extremely fine, 7¾ x 6 inches (19.7 x 15.2 cm).

In Siegfried's Journey, pp. 121-122, Sassoon describes this photograph and its importance for him: 'On the mantlepiece was the framed portrait he had given me, propitiously inscribed with my name as well as his own signature. When sitting to the photographer about five years before, he had contrived to intimate that he wasn't such a great man as his admirers imagined. There was a just discernable expression of amusement in his eyes and about the region of the moustache. Except for the majesty of his brow, Hardy the poet had evaded the camera. That photograph, I have now told myself, was something to be lived up to. It was the hall-mark on such recognition as my poetry had so far achieved. For there was no one, among living writers, whose approval could have the significance of his.'

The plate of the coloured photograph is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Another of the photographs taken on the same occasion is illustrated opposite page 156 in Florence Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892-1928, 1930, and a further one was signed by Hardy for the Society of Authors. For portraits of Sassoon see lots 134-135. See note on Olive Edis at the end of the catalogue.