Portrait photograph of W.B. Yeats.

[Victoria, London: ca. 1903].

Price: $3,250.00


About the item

Platinum print on thick-paper mount. 9-3/8 x 7-1/2 inches. Top left corner of the print ruffled, one or two very faint surface scratches, otherwise excellent, the mount a little ruffled at the corners and with some minor glue-related abrasions to verso.

Item #310106

This portrait of a pensive W. B. Yeats was taken by London-based American photographer Sherril V. Schell (1877-1964), who during the first decades of the 20th century in his Victoria studio executed portraits of several London literary figures such as Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and, famously, Rupert Brooke. Schell has signed the mount in pencil, and stamped both the print and mount verso “Photograph by Sherril Schell, 116, Victoria Street, S.W., Telephone:-7144 Victoria”. This print was one of several in different poses from the same sitting retained by Yeats himself and has been in the family by descent. Another image from the Schell sitting was used as the frontispiece for Forrest Reid’s monograph, W. B. Yeats, a Critical Study (1915), which was the first of its kind.