Issue 40 winter 23 web - Flipbook - Page 100
recalled it as ‘that paperweight’ behind which Virginia
kept her letters, or worse, a jumble of notes from rival
romantic partners.
and at Monk’s House in East Sussex, the home of her
lover Virginia Woolf.
A highlight of the exhibition is the reunion of two pieces
of stone from the ruins of the ancient palace of Persepolis,
which Vita visited in 1927 – one piece of which was a gift
to Harold and the other for Virginia. The significance of
these pieces has very recently come to light during
research for the exhibition.
Also reunited for the first time since the 1920s, is a blue
‘cog’ dish, bought by Vita in an assortment at a bazaar in
Tehran and given to Virginia. Usually displayed at Monk’s
House, it will be exhibited alongside similar dishes from
the group kept in Vita’s Writing Room at Sissinghurst.
The exhibition includes a set of orange beads, given to
Vita when she and Harold were invited to dine with the
Il-Khan, the supreme chief of the Bakhtiari Tribe. She
recalls “the string of corals with which he was playing,
slipping the beads between his fingers as he talked, as all
Persians do; it lies on my table as I write.” Until the
research was carried out for this exhibition, the provenance and identity of the beads had been thought lost.
The two pieces probably come from the beard of one of
the Assyrian large-scale bull figures which flanked and
guarded the columned portico of the Hundred Columned
Hall at Persepolis and clearly show the whorls of hair from
the beard.
They are believed to have already been in fragments when
Vita and Harold found them at the site, however
researchers are considering whether Vita may have cut
one of the pieces in half. She treated them as keepsakes,
and much like real locks of hair given to a beloved, they
served as love tokens to Harold and Virginia. Vita kept a
third, but different, fragment from another part of the
Persepolis palace on her own desk. [1]
Vita and Harold’s personal photographs provide many
glimpses of life and monuments in the 1920s that were
transformed in the following decades. They photographed
mounted tribesmen and migrating families whose way of
life radically changed within a generation. Their many
views of Persepolis show that they keenly explored the site
before it was changed by excavation in 1931.
However, Virginia’s fragment later came to represent the
‘ruin’ of their relationship. In 1934, regretting that Vita
no longer loved her, Virginia wrote describing ‘the piece
of Persepolis’ on her mantelpiece as ‘gathering dust’. Vita
Shots not displayed in public before include their
time within the Tehran Embassy compound; from the
Above, pieces of sculpture from the ancient palace of Persepolis, given by Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson (bottom) and Virginia
Woolf (top) ©National Trust Images James Beck
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