I
couldn’t help laughing at the latest ‘offer’ from the NPG shop [I know I shouldn’t, but…] which is a limited edition of 30 hand-finished
platinum prints after the original portraits of RUPERT BROOKE taken by Sherill
Schell in London in 1913.
Brooke’s
friends famously dubbed this bare-shoulder one ‘Your Favourite Actress’, after
the celebrity show-biz images of the time.
Brooke
was currently dating the actress Cathleen Nesbit, before his
departure for the United States and beyond, in the months prior to taking up a
fellowship at Cambridge. ‘How many photographs do you have taken in a month, I
wonder,’ he asked her. ‘What a life!
Even we literary men, though, have our little moments. My celebrated amateur photographer who took
me for his collection of Eminent Poets has just sent me two gigantic works of
Art, on eternal paper – a new process – depicting a tortured elderly man
reflecting in prison on the earlier plays of M. Strindberg – me, he says. I shall present them to the nation. Now I’m bombarded by an American photographer
called Sherill Schell (!). You know all about America – does he exist? He says he’s in London for a month – I suspect
him of being a fraud.’
A
couple of weeks later, writing from the Wyndhams’ house Clouds, he told
Cathleen that ‘nothing has happened: except that my American photographer has
sent me a photograph of me – very shadowy and ethereal and poetic, of me in profile,
and naked-shouldered. Eddie [Marsh] says it’s very good. I think it’s rather
silly.
‘But
anyhow, I don’t look like an amateur popular preacher – as in those
others. And no one will ever be able to
put it into an interview, with the words “We want great serious drama”
underneath.’
After the image gained global popularity following Brooke's death in WWI and its use in his Collected Poems, Schell gave an account of the sitting - on a foggy day in a borrowed apartment in Pimlico - saying that Brooke arrived wearing a blue shirt and long blue silk tie, and talked of the Ballets Russes and Hello Ragtime! Using natural light and minute-long exposures, Schell took twelve frames; he claimed that for the last Brooke himself suggested the pose, 'showing his bare neck and shoulders. For this he stripped to the waist, revealing a torso that recalled the young Hermes.'
'It's positively obscene', wrote Jacques Raverat to Maynard Keynes. 'Let us write him a very insulting letter, suggesting that a photo of him completely in the nude would doubtless find a large sale.'
Sadly, I haven't been able to trace the photos for Eminent Poets, apparently taken by a non-professional named Murchison.
