14 / 172
7
●
VANESSA BELL.
“Some Poems of Mallarmé.” Study for the dust jacket illustration for “Some Poems of
Mallarmé” by Roger Fry and Charles Mauron, published by Chatto & Windus, London,
1936.Watercolor and pencil on board. 220x145 mm; 8
5
/
8
x5
3
/
4
inches, image.Archivally mat-
ted and framed.
[3,000/4,000]
Fry came to know Charles Mauron in the early 1920s and repeatedly sought his advice and assis-
tance on a translation into English of selected poems by the French poet Mallarmé, a project that he
had begun during the period of the Omega Workshops (the design enterprise of the Bloomsbury
Group which he founded). Fry’s letters to the Woolfs during the early 1920s frequently mention his
hope that these translations would be published by the Hogarth Press, but he never completed the pro-
ject. In 1928, Fry asked Mauron to write a commentary for his translations, and after Fry’s death,
Mauron and Julian Bell,Vanessa and Clive Bell’s son, drew on Fry’s notes to complete the long-imag-
ined volume. The jacket by Vanessa Bell is among her most evocative, a tribute to her long-time
colleague and friend, in much the same way as her sister Virginia Woolf’s 1940 biography of Fry
was—David H. Porter, Omega Lives:The OmegaWorkshops & the Hogarth Press, Chapin Library,
Williams College October - December, 2007.