Edith Sitwell; Sir Osbert Sitwell

1 portrait of Edith Sitwell

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Edith Sitwell; Sir Osbert Sitwell

by Bill Brandt
bromide print on card mount, 1945
13 5/8 in. x 11 1/2 in. (345 mm x 292 mm)
Purchased, 1982
Photographs Collection
NPG x22477

Sittersback to top

Artistback to top

  • Bill Brandt (1904-1983), Photographer. Artist or producer of 120 portraits, Sitter in 34 portraits.

This portraitback to top

The poet and writer siblings posed in the drawing room at Renishaw Hall, the Sitwell seat in Derbyshire. In the background is the John Singer Sargent painting of The Sitwell Family (1900), showing them as children. Below is an eighteenth century silhouette of the Sitwell and Warneford families by Francis Torond on the wall behind. Published in Lilliput, November 1949 illustrating a portfolio of photographs of writers, entitled An Odd Lot with text by Alan Pryce-Jones.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Clerk, Honor, The Sitwells, 1994 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 14 October - 22 January 1995), p. 183 Read entry

    The photographs of Edith and Osbert by the landscape and portrait photographer Bill Brandt remain among the best-known images of the two writers. Here they are posed in the drawing-room at Renishaw, with the Sargent group and an eighteenth-century silhouette of the Sitwell and Warneford families by Francis Torond on the wall behind. This photograph appeared in Lilliput in November 1949 illustrating a series on writers (entitled ‘An Odd Lot’) with a text by Alan Pryce-Jones. ‘In a plain age, they have always maintained coloured standards. Large houses and large imaginings; good prose and good food; movement and vision; warm friendship and blood rows – in public and in private their roles are as remote from the Century of the Common Man as the Aztecs.’1

    On the eastern side of the garden at Renishaw is the entrance to the ‘Wildreness’, or Brockshill Wood, flanked by statues of a warrior and an amazon. Osbert used Brandt’s photograph as an illustration inGreat Morning (1948). 2

    1 A. Pryce-Jones in Lillput, November 1949.

    2 Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning, 1948, ill. f.p. 57.

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Subjects & Themesback to top

Events of 1945back to top

Current affairs

Despite Churchill's popularity during, and indeed after, the War, Clement Attlee wins a landslide Labour victory in the general election. Labour's success was due to its promise of a better society through the Welfare state, and was demonstrative of the public's desire for a new and better post-War society.

Art and science

Noel Coward's Brief Encounter is released. The film, based on Coward's play, Still Life, is about the love affair between two married people who meet at a railway station. Conscious of the risk of being caught the couple decide to break off their relationship to protect their marriages.
George Orwell publishes his satirical novel Animal Farm, as an allegorical critique of Soviet Totalitarianism.

International

A war on two fronts finally proves too much for Germany as allied forces push from the East and West. On the 30th April Hitler committed suicide and Germany soon surrendered to Soviet troops. Victory in Europe was announced on the 8th May. War in the Pacific continued until America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 214,000 people, and ending the war with Japan.

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