This old postcard is undated but might it be 1920s? Or perhaps earlier, since apparently Rupert Brooke’s landlady was Mrs JW Stevenson – so maybe this is early 1900s. Someone will tell us!

The first edition of Greengates (which we have just donated to the Surrey History Centre, here).

This Self Portrait (curiously subtitled ‘A Motion Picture’) is by Margaret Foster Richardson (1881-1945). She was best known for her portraits in oil and also drew portraits in silverpoint and exhibited landscape sketches and genre scenes. She studied at the Massachusetts Normal School from 1900-05 and attended the MFA School from 1905 to 1908, where she was a student of Edmund Tarbell and assisted Anson Cross in his perspective class. She achieved tremendous early success but then faded out of sight (?maybe she became a mother…). Her work was  selected for numerous national exhibitions, beginning in 1908 with the Corcoran Gallery Biennial, and she was given her first solo show at the Copley Gallery in 1910. In 1913 this painting was bought by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where it is still on show. After that silence.

Stephen Crowther (1922-2007) painted this self-portrait in 1941 when he was 19. Born in Sheffield, he studied at the College of Art there, then won the Royal College of Art scholarship the year he painted this portrait (unsurprisingly). War service intervened but he eventually went to the Royal College in 1946, studying under Gilbert Spencer, Rodrigo Moynihan and Carel Weight. From 1950-87 he was a lecturer in drawing and painting at Cleveland College of Art & Design, Hartlepool. There are a few more details about this unsung genius here and here.

Oddments this week and next: images which have no linking theme apart from our loving them and their having some vague relation to Persephone Books. Today Sunday Afternoon by Leonard John Fuller (1891-1973), undated but the young woman has a kind of Vera Brittain look which would place the painting at 1916/1918 (also the boy’s father is conspicuously absent and the older woman is reading the newspaper quite anxiously).

St Bartholomew, Orford is a glorious church also very much vaut le détour. It was originally Norman but there have been many changes over the centuries (detailed here). The font is fifteenth century, it has ‘a pieta, the weeping Mother of God holding the broken body of her son in a detail of the Deposition from the Cross’ (quotation from an excellent blog about the church by Simon Knott here).

Orford Castle is magnificent. It was built by Henry II in the late twelfth century, and for 150 years was an important symbol of royal power on the coast, which included Henry II’s conflicts with his sons.  However, in the fourteenth century it was sold off, and the new owner demolished the outside walls, leaving the central castle intact to help ships find their location.  From the twelfth century onwards Orford was a significant port for the wool trade and fishing; it declined from the sixteenth century, partly due to the wars over the North Sea in the Netherlands  – the wars that also destroyed the commercial dominance of Antwerp.