Edith Sitwell - On Being Eccentric
As a kid in London, my family had a friend, the minor Bloomsbury Group painter, Eve Disher, whose 1940 work 'Still Life of Arum Lilies and Tulips' ...
Eve Disher - 'Still Life of Arum Lilies and Tulips' (1940)
... I bought not so long ago from an antique dealer in a small town in France.
One day at Eve's flat in Eccleston Square, Knightsbridge, the phone rang and it was Sachervall Sitwell - one of the famed eccentric sibling triumvirate of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell ...
... with Edith, a poet, being perhaps the most physically arresting of the three ...
Some of Edith's poems were set to music, most famously a series known as 'Facade' which had an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton. And I recall going to a performance or reading of this work in my late teens.
All up then, I've always had a soft spot for the Sitwells (and eccentrics in general) and when I heard this 1959 interview with then Dame Edith Sitwell ...
... I was keen to share it round.
Hope you like it as much as I do.
Congratulations on getting the painting! That's a marvelous thing to find!
ReplyDeleteLove the interview with Dame Edith. The world really would be a much poorer place without folks like the Sitwells...what an extraordinary bunch! But where are such people today?
hi paul
Deleteyes, quite amazing the journey the painting has finally made, after my seeing it as a kid on Eve's drawing room wall
for reasons best left as they are so obvious, i've always been drawn to eccentrics - like the minor Bloomsburys that i knew as a kid (eve disher, and the gay triumvirate of sir arther elton, basil wright and john grierson).
sir arther's daughter, Julia, has become an arch conservative and deals in the fine art which her father eschewed for industrial art.
and so yes, where are the Bloomsburys and the Sitwells of today!
What a charmer! Beyond elegant and so likable.
ReplyDeletehi anon
Deleteabsolutely! i'd have loved to have sat and chatted for an hour or twenty with her
and she had such such startling and wonderful style - that a drag queen would envy