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A moving collection of apparently unpublished letters from influential British artist Thérèse Lessore, founder of the London Group, to Vanessa Bell, exchanging sympathy and support in the wake of their shared grief: the deaths of Virginia Woolf on 28 March 1941 and Lessore's husband Walter Sickert on 22 January 1942. The Woolf condolence letter is not published in Sybil Oldfield's Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf (2005). Bell and Lessore were both lauded artists. Bell became a member of Lessore's London Group in 1919 and regularly exhibited with them. Sickert and Bell were good friends long before his marriage to Lessore: he was married twice prior and openly nursed romantic, though unreciprocated, affection for Bell. Lessore's previous marriage to Bernard Adeney had remained unconsummated, and "Bell and Duncan Grant were convinced that the relationship [with Sickert] was platonic - not least because Sickert devoted so much sexual energy to flirting 'hard' with Vanessa whenever they met" (Sturgis, p. 533). When Lessore and Sickert married in 1926, he was sixty-six and she was forty-one. It was a companionable later-life relationship founded on friendship and shared artistry. Sickert remarked that Lessore "was the only woman he had ever met who took no notice of what he said but did exactly as she pleased. It proved the basis of a very happy union" (Sturgis, p. 555). The first letter, dated 6 April 1941, is a model of tactful concision following Woolf's suicide: "Dear Vanessa, Walter & I send you our love. Affectionately, Thérèse". The following year, on 22 January, Sickert died. The second letter, of 1 February, is a Lessore's response to Bell's condolences. "I was so very touched by your letter - first that Walter should have asked for your help for me & that you should remember this after so many years and wish to act. Walter was asking for your friendship which I have always delighted in. I feel my inheritance is a very rich one, in the affection of his friends. These last years have been very happy ones for him. When the war started he left off reading newspapers and so was saved much sorrow. He tried to sing a song the week before he died. He did not suffer much & the end was a very peaceful fading out". The final two letters concern Lessore's move from Bath to London following her husband's death. In the letter dated 13 January 1944, Lessore writes: "My dear Vanessa, I came upon this diary, it has a drawing in it of your son, perhaps you may like to have it". Bell had two sons: Quentin, who outlived his mother, and Julian, who was killed in the Spanish War in 1937. It may be that the portrait was of the latter, offered with a memorial gesture in the midst of war. The letter of 11 April 1944 more openly references the difficulties of the ongoing war, inviting Bell to visit, but admitting that "the noise is ghastly when they raid". Matthew Sturgis, Walter Sickert: a Life, 2005. Four leaves manuscript letters signed, text recto only (except the second). Two on pale purple paper addressed from St George's Hill House, Bathampton, Bath, dated 6 April 1941 (138 x 129 mm) & 1 February [1942] (206 x 128 mm); two on cream paper addressed from 10 Lansdowne Road, London W.11, dated 13 January 1944 (203 x 127 mm) & 11 April 1944 (177 x 140 mm). Creased from folding, nick to foot of final letter, very fresh and attractive.
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