[Siegfried Sassoon 1886-1967)]

Lot 50
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 2 142
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108849
Lot 50 | [Siegfried Sassoon 1886-1967)]
Estimate value
£ 2 000 – 3 000
[Siegfried Sassoon 1886-1967)]
Twelve letters to Siegfried Sassoon by William Walton (1), Eric Kennington (3), Stanley Spencer (1), William Rothenstein (6) and others (1), c.1923-1943
17 pages in total, various sizes, typed and handwritten. Provenance: Roy Davids Limited, 25 November 1997 and Sotheby's, 18 July 1991, lot 4.

Letters on the European political situation, artworks, and other matters from a range of prominent composers and writers. The letter from William Walton on 24 March 1933 discusses his work which ‘moves very slowly & painfully – it must be an “outsize baby” for I can’t remember ever having been so tired before. Anyhow I hope to finish it, or at least be well into the last movement before I leave’. Spencer writes on 13 May 1923 that for the past week he has been ‘drawing out on paper a scheme of war pictures all having to do with Salonica’, continuing to describe in detail his pictures of the resurrections of soldiers there. Rothenstein, praising his skill in conjuring up real portraits of people in his work, also tells Sassoon of visits to James Stephens and Max Beerbohm, mentioning lunch with Walter de la Mare, as well as reacting to the idea of making a collection of Max’s political cartoons. He continues, ‘But memory is one thing to suggest the ambience of time, situations, of a mood evoked, quite another, to give through the mist of distance, what painters call “values” is the test of artistry’. Kennington, enclosing a cyclostyled page for 'The Royal Artillery War Commemoration Book', congratulates Sassoon on ‘a grand book’. Also with a card by Kennington to E. M. Forster and a letter by William de Morgan.
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