BIB_ID
159964
Accession number
MA 1617.154
Creator
Furse, Charles Wellington, 1868-1904.
Display Date
London, England, 1894 November.
Credit line
Purchased as the gift of Edwin J. Beinecke, 1955.
Description
1 item (2 pages) ; 25.4 20.2 cm
Notes
Written from "33, Tite Street, / Chelsea" on stationery engraved with the address.
Likely date of writing from penciled notation at the top of the first page. In a published letter to William Heinemann, dated November 12, 1894, Henley says Heinemann's letter reached him at Hindhead.
Henley's daughter, Margaret Emma Henley died on February 11, 1894 at the age of 5.
The Baba was one of several nicknames for Margaret Henley, the most common of which was "The Emperor."
Likely date of writing from penciled notation at the top of the first page. In a published letter to William Heinemann, dated November 12, 1894, Henley says Heinemann's letter reached him at Hindhead.
Henley's daughter, Margaret Emma Henley died on February 11, 1894 at the age of 5.
The Baba was one of several nicknames for Margaret Henley, the most common of which was "The Emperor."
Provenance
Purchased as the gift of Edwin J. Beinecke, 1955.
Summary
Concerning his portrait of Margaret Henley; saying "I can't tell you how glad I am that you & Mrs. Henley find anything in the sketch to like, especially as I feel convinced I can get that again & perhaps more too - Eleanor Butcher was most awfully keen about my doing the portrait, I had told her of Baba [Margaret Henley] & she wrote me a letter (I was at Manchester at the time) telling me of the child's illness which she had just heard of from Mrs. Pennell and I don't think even your friends could have felt more acutely than she did. The hideous tragedy of it all and over & over again she said to me 'You must make time to pull that portrait through' when we were discussing plans & our future generally - I am glad you are going to Hindhead. It is a big [illegible] country & the air as it blows free across those rolling uplands is keen & lift giving & I don't believe a grey [illegible], however beautiful, is a good companion for a tired mind, it is so old & hoary, so full of memory that in winter, at any rate, its mouldiness must tend to chill & deaden one's vitality - & splendidly as you are endowed with stamina & energy, there was never a time when you wanted those qualities so much as you do now - I have just come from a stormy meeting at the New English where for two hours I tried to explain, & eventually succeeded, that it was neither modest nor even decent to invite Balfour, Chamberlain, the Lord Mayor, Leighton & yourself to a dinner in the galleries on which Walter Sickert & Rothenstein had sat their hearts - I am now wondering whether a monumental snobbery or an exhaustive ignorance of good manners was responsible for the idea."
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