Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath's Painted Chair at Auction

Wooley & Wallis auctioned, today, in Lot 605, a chair painted by Sylvia Plath when she was living at Court Green, Devon, England. It appeared originally at the big Bonhams sale back in 2018 but failed to sell.  My thanks to Peter Fydler who tweeted about this auction on 9 April.

The description reads as follows:

A child's nursery elbow chair painted by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Estimate: £200 - £400 + Buyers Premium

A child's nursery elbow chair painted by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

With coloured flower and heart pattern over a white ground

47 x 28 x 29cm

Together with 3 balls of the red wool used for the original woven seat, and a letter from Frieda Hughes confirming the provenance

(5)Provenance:

Painted by Sylvia Plath for her children Frieda (b.1960), and Nicholas (b.1962);

Loaned by Ted Hughes (1930-1998) to a family friend

Property of Frieda Hughes




The chair SOLD for £3,500 ($4,936.56) including buyers premium. 

Sylvia Plath painted a number of pieces of furniture. Most them are now held by Smith College. 


Her inspiration for the painting came from an issue of Woman's Day magazine. Read more about it!

All links accessed 8 and 11 May 2020.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous12 May, 2021 17:55

    Do you know what the large table in the last picture was used for? Given the height of it compared to the painted chair, I'm guessing a sideboard of some kind?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg12 May, 2021 18:20

    Hi Anonymous: Smith College has cataloged it as a "Trestle table". https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/163613 ~pks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...
2 comments
Read more

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...
4 comments
Read more