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Cyril Connolly; Lady Caroline Blackwood

4 of 47 portraits by Daniel Farson

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© Michael Parkin / National Portrait Gallery, London

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Cyril Connolly; Lady Caroline Blackwood

by Daniel Farson
bromide print, 1954
7 in. x 7 in. (178 mm x 178 mm)
Purchased, 1985
Primary Collection
NPG P290

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  • Daniel Farson (1927-1997), Photographer and writer. Artist or producer of 47 portraits, Sitter in 6 portraits.

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Writer and daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Blackwood, at the time of this photograph, was married to Lucian Freud. Connolly (1903 -74) was then a critic for The Sunday Times. He was one of Blackwood's numerous admirers and is shown with her outside Wheeler's, Old Compton Street, Soho. Frequented by Farson's friends Freud, Francis Bacon and John Deakin, he described the fish restaurant as having 'particular panache in the fifties…In return we provided a sort of cabaret.'

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  • Rogers, Malcolm, Camera Portraits, 1989 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 October 1989 - 21 January 1990), p. 265 Read entry

    Daniel Farson's photographic career began immediately after the Second World War in Germany, when he was posted to the American Air Corps newsletter Stars and Stripes, and later at Cambridge he ran and illustrated his own magazine Panorama. In the 1950s he worked for Picture Post and Harper's Bazaar, and in 1951 discovered Soho. There, while pursuing a career as a journalist and as one of the first British television personalities, in an atmosphere of perpetual hangover, he took a series of photographs of the denizens of this bohemian haunt - forties diehards and some brilliant newcomers - which are redolent of the period. Cecil Beaton designated his photographs 'anti-artistic', and certainly their style is generally spare and documentary, though to this double portrait of two writers he brings a faintly sinister note of unspecified drama. It was taken outside the fish-restaurant Wheeler's in Old Compton Street, described by Farson in his Soho in the Fifties (1987). In the post-war years it represented luxury, and to the artistic set of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud it became both dining-room and club. According to Farson: 'Over the years the staff shared our triumphs and disasters, observed our high spirits and furious arguments, and became our friends. In return, we provided a sort of cabaret'.

    Connolly, who is best known for his bon mot 'imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out', was an unsparing observer of the literary scene and of himself. He wrote in The Unquiet Grave (1944) that 'the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence', and his whole life can seem like a commentary on his failure to produce that masterpiece. He was nevertheless a distinguished editor of Horizon, and as a leading book reviewer for The Sunday Times his opinions had a lasting influence on a younger generation. The novelist and critic Lady Caroline Blackwood is the daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. She was a favourite model, and at the time of this photograph the wife of the painter Lucian Freud. She subsequently married the American poet Robert Lowell, who wrote of her 'moon-eyes', 'bulge-eyes bigger than your man's fist', eyes which are familiar from the hypnotic portraits of her by Freud.

  • Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 140

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Art and science

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Williams Golding publishes, Lord of the Flies.

International

The South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) is established in Bangkok. This international defence organisation was established as part of the 'containment' policy of limiting the influence of communism. SEATO was, however, found to be ineffective as the member organisations failed to agree on combined action; it was disbanded in 1977.

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