I fell in love with this picture the moment I saw it in 2012:
‘The Family at Tea’
Reproduced by kind permission of John Pym and the National Trust
I had come across it on the website for the National Trust’s property of Emmetts in Kent. It is no longer available there, but actually it is an illustration to a superb article by Richard Wheeler, National Specialist in Garden History at the National Trust, entitled ‘Frederic Lubbock and Emmetts: Stereoscopic Views of an Edwardian Plant Collector’, which appeared in the Trust’s Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2010, pp. 26-33.
The article explains how John Pym, a great-grandson of Frederic and Catherine Lubbock, who owned Emmetts 1890-1927, made available to Wheeler a staggering collection of nearly two hundred colour and black-and-white photographs taken on glass with the Autochrome process and illustrating the singular specimen gardens that Frederic Lubbock had created at Emmetts. These plates were of invaluable use to the NT in restoring the gardens to how they had been during the Lubbocks’ residency. I cannot recommend warmly enough a visit to Emmetts (near another NT gem, Chartwell) to enjoy the achievement: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/emmetts-garden .
What wowed me about this photograph?
Well first, it has to be admitted, that mellow, early autumnal light that we (daftly) associate with the Edwardian era, and the Seurat-like grainy texture that we also (mysteriously) associate with Edwardian England but which is merely a product of this ingenious early colour photography process. Then the scene, the clothes (those hats and white shoes!), the wicker chairs, the style and distinction of it all, seem quintessentially Edwardian…and there in the middle I instantly recognised George Calderon.
However, it is no exaggeration to say that my relations with this photograph have been as misguided, obsessive and fictive as some of Alexander Masters’s theories/assumptions in pursuit of the heroine of A Life Discarded (see previous post).
Naturally, I put the picture straight on my list of twenty-five illustrations to my book. But these have to be arranged chronologically. Where did it go?
With brainless ease, I dated it as September 1904, when George had raced back to England from Cap Gris Nez to meet Kittie at Emmetts, and indeed told her what clothes, cigarettes and pills to pack and take there for him. George is undoubtedly the man in black tie and boater sitting left of the hostess in the big hat, who is undoubtedly Catherine Lubbock. But where was Kittie? She was thirty-seven in 1904 and therefore could hardly be the demure figure sitting right of the young man extreme left, who is pretty certainly Percy Lubbock.
At this point I must explain that in 1972 I was standing in the yard of the Chekhov family rented property in Moscow discussing with an expert the famous Chekhov family photographic portrait taken there in about 1888. I mentioned in passing that Chekhov’s youngest brother, sitting next to Anton in the front row, was holding under his arm a large chicken that he had somehow got to look straight at the camera. Deafening silence and perturbation. No-one, it seemed, had ever noticed this before.
Unconsciously applying this talent for apophenia and pareidolia (see my post of 25 June 2016), I convinced myself that the blackness in front of the lady third from the left was Jones, the Calderons’ Aberdeen terrier, sitting on the lap of Mrs Mary Hamilton, Kittie’s mother. Even so, where was Kittie, who was not known to be photophobic? Well, obviously, she had been sitting in the empty chair in the middle, but had vacated it to improve the staging and had been the person who pressed the shutter… The figure right of Mrs Hamilton and Jones is undoubtedly Charles ‘Evey’ Pym, the man right of Catherine is Frederic Lubbock, the young man extreme right must be a son. I thought. So the photograph went into the Illustrations list in the 1904 position and was referred to by that Fig. number in my text.
Alas, at the time I had not read the whole of Richard Wheeler’s article, a copy of which has been very generously donated to me by Mr Pym. The penultimate paragraph of the article explains that the Autochrome process was ‘invented by Louis and Auguste Lumière in 1903, and first marketed in 1907’ and everything I have read since confirms that. There were no colour processes before 1907 that could have produced the quality of ‘The Family at Tea’. This cannot be a photograph of George before 1907, therefore. I had misdated it (not to mention misidentified Mrs Hamilton, who died in 1906) and misnumbered it in my list of illustrations to the book, which means that I have to change the text in the book referring to the photograph, and renumber all the other Fig.’s from 1905 to 1911 in subsequent chapters. Aaargh!
So when was the photograph taken, why isn’t Kittie on it, and who might the unidentified persons be?
If the old lady in black is not Mrs Hamilton with Jones (who died in 1909), then the photograph could have been taken when Kittie was not staying at Emmetts but George was. There were many occasions when Kittie stayed there on her own, as she was related to Catherine Lubbock by her first marriage, but there’s only one documented occasion when she was in Kent with George but left a day earlier than him. This was in 1912, when they both in fact stayed at nearby Foxwold, where Evey and his wife Violet Pym (the Lubbocks’ only daughter) had recently taken up residence. They arrived together on 30 September 1912, Kittie left on 7 October, probably to attend to their recent purchase of 42 Well Walk in Hampstead, and George left the day after with Percy Lubbock. The photo could therefore have been taken in the afternoon of 7 October 1912…
By then, however, Evey and Violet had been married seven years and had two children, so could the figure right of Percy really be his sister? And the only son of the Lubbocks who would be the right age in 1912 for the man extreme right is Roy (born 1892), who because of his technical interests, John Pym suggests, may have been the family’s Autochrome photographer. How, though, did he manage to be in the picture as well? Again, whose was the empty chair? Was that where the person who pressed the shutter had been sitting? What did Roy Lubbock actually look like in 1912? Was he that tall? Did he have black hair?
Myself, I have gone fictive like Alexander Masters and decided to call the lady in black ‘Mrs Mortley’. I already imagine her life story. Before long, that is who she will ‘become’…
I am deeply indebted to John Pym, Richard Wheeler, and Annina Lubbock, for their unstinting assistance in reading this picture correctly.
NOTE (25 April 2021): I now believe that the young woman sitting at Percy Lubbock’s left is Celia Newbolt (b. 1890) and the chaperone at her left (‘Mrs Mortley’) is her maternal grandmother, Edina Duckworth (1837-1916). According to Susan Chitty, Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet, 1997), p. 184, ‘Celia had a brief flirtation with Percy Lubbock, literary critic’, at about this time. Inquiries of people who knew Roy Lubbock make it very likely that he is the young man extreme right. At the time of writing, then, the most likely identity of the photographer is Violet Pym, who we know had been an avid photographer since her teens and is the most obvious candidate to have occupied the empty chair at the table nearest her mother.
Related
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon c.1901
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
A slight hitch, aaargh!
I fell in love with this picture the moment I saw it in 2012:
‘The Family at Tea’
Reproduced by kind permission of John Pym and the National Trust
I had come across it on the website for the National Trust’s property of Emmetts in Kent. It is no longer available there, but actually it is an illustration to a superb article by Richard Wheeler, National Specialist in Garden History at the National Trust, entitled ‘Frederic Lubbock and Emmetts: Stereoscopic Views of an Edwardian Plant Collector’, which appeared in the Trust’s Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2010, pp. 26-33.
The article explains how John Pym, a great-grandson of Frederic and Catherine Lubbock, who owned Emmetts 1890-1927, made available to Wheeler a staggering collection of nearly two hundred colour and black-and-white photographs taken on glass with the Autochrome process and illustrating the singular specimen gardens that Frederic Lubbock had created at Emmetts. These plates were of invaluable use to the NT in restoring the gardens to how they had been during the Lubbocks’ residency. I cannot recommend warmly enough a visit to Emmetts (near another NT gem, Chartwell) to enjoy the achievement: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/emmetts-garden .
What wowed me about this photograph?
Well first, it has to be admitted, that mellow, early autumnal light that we (daftly) associate with the Edwardian era, and the Seurat-like grainy texture that we also (mysteriously) associate with Edwardian England but which is merely a product of this ingenious early colour photography process. Then the scene, the clothes (those hats and white shoes!), the wicker chairs, the style and distinction of it all, seem quintessentially Edwardian…and there in the middle I instantly recognised George Calderon.
However, it is no exaggeration to say that my relations with this photograph have been as misguided, obsessive and fictive as some of Alexander Masters’s theories/assumptions in pursuit of the heroine of A Life Discarded (see previous post).
Naturally, I put the picture straight on my list of twenty-five illustrations to my book. But these have to be arranged chronologically. Where did it go?
With brainless ease, I dated it as September 1904, when George had raced back to England from Cap Gris Nez to meet Kittie at Emmetts, and indeed told her what clothes, cigarettes and pills to pack and take there for him. George is undoubtedly the man in black tie and boater sitting left of the hostess in the big hat, who is undoubtedly Catherine Lubbock. But where was Kittie? She was thirty-seven in 1904 and therefore could hardly be the demure figure sitting right of the young man extreme left, who is pretty certainly Percy Lubbock.
At this point I must explain that in 1972 I was standing in the yard of the Chekhov family rented property in Moscow discussing with an expert the famous Chekhov family photographic portrait taken there in about 1888. I mentioned in passing that Chekhov’s youngest brother, sitting next to Anton in the front row, was holding under his arm a large chicken that he had somehow got to look straight at the camera. Deafening silence and perturbation. No-one, it seemed, had ever noticed this before.
Unconsciously applying this talent for apophenia and pareidolia (see my post of 25 June 2016), I convinced myself that the blackness in front of the lady third from the left was Jones, the Calderons’ Aberdeen terrier, sitting on the lap of Mrs Mary Hamilton, Kittie’s mother. Even so, where was Kittie, who was not known to be photophobic? Well, obviously, she had been sitting in the empty chair in the middle, but had vacated it to improve the staging and had been the person who pressed the shutter… The figure right of Mrs Hamilton and Jones is undoubtedly Charles ‘Evey’ Pym, the man right of Catherine is Frederic Lubbock, the young man extreme right must be a son. I thought. So the photograph went into the Illustrations list in the 1904 position and was referred to by that Fig. number in my text.
Alas, at the time I had not read the whole of Richard Wheeler’s article, a copy of which has been very generously donated to me by Mr Pym. The penultimate paragraph of the article explains that the Autochrome process was ‘invented by Louis and Auguste Lumière in 1903, and first marketed in 1907’ and everything I have read since confirms that. There were no colour processes before 1907 that could have produced the quality of ‘The Family at Tea’. This cannot be a photograph of George before 1907, therefore. I had misdated it (not to mention misidentified Mrs Hamilton, who died in 1906) and misnumbered it in my list of illustrations to the book, which means that I have to change the text in the book referring to the photograph, and renumber all the other Fig.’s from 1905 to 1911 in subsequent chapters. Aaargh!
So when was the photograph taken, why isn’t Kittie on it, and who might the unidentified persons be?
If the old lady in black is not Mrs Hamilton with Jones (who died in 1909), then the photograph could have been taken when Kittie was not staying at Emmetts but George was. There were many occasions when Kittie stayed there on her own, as she was related to Catherine Lubbock by her first marriage, but there’s only one documented occasion when she was in Kent with George but left a day earlier than him. This was in 1912, when they both in fact stayed at nearby Foxwold, where Evey and his wife Violet Pym (the Lubbocks’ only daughter) had recently taken up residence. They arrived together on 30 September 1912, Kittie left on 7 October, probably to attend to their recent purchase of 42 Well Walk in Hampstead, and George left the day after with Percy Lubbock. The photo could therefore have been taken in the afternoon of 7 October 1912…
By then, however, Evey and Violet had been married seven years and had two children, so could the figure right of Percy really be his sister? And the only son of the Lubbocks who would be the right age in 1912 for the man extreme right is Roy (born 1892), who because of his technical interests, John Pym suggests, may have been the family’s Autochrome photographer. How, though, did he manage to be in the picture as well? Again, whose was the empty chair? Was that where the person who pressed the shutter had been sitting? What did Roy Lubbock actually look like in 1912? Was he that tall? Did he have black hair?
Myself, I have gone fictive like Alexander Masters and decided to call the lady in black ‘Mrs Mortley’. I already imagine her life story. Before long, that is who she will ‘become’…
I am deeply indebted to John Pym, Richard Wheeler, and Annina Lubbock, for their unstinting assistance in reading this picture correctly.
NOTE (25 April 2021): I now believe that the young woman sitting at Percy Lubbock’s left is Celia Newbolt (b. 1890) and the chaperone at her left (‘Mrs Mortley’) is her maternal grandmother, Edina Duckworth (1837-1916). According to Susan Chitty, Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet, 1997), p. 184, ‘Celia had a brief flirtation with Percy Lubbock, literary critic’, at about this time. Inquiries of people who knew Roy Lubbock make it very likely that he is the young man extreme right. At the time of writing, then, the most likely identity of the photographer is Violet Pym, who we know had been an avid photographer since her teens and is the most obvious candidate to have occupied the empty chair at the table nearest her mother.
Share this:
Related