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Showing posts from May, 2025

The Dome Sylvia Plath Drew

The recent identification of three of Sylvia Plath's drawings was fun. I enjoyed discussing these with Anna Dykta and bouncing off ideas and discussing the nuances of Plath's artwork as well as her travels. The drawing of a dome/tower labelled "Paris rooftops" in Drawings  (page 30, 2013) was another of Plath's pen and ink works about which I wondered, for years: where is this? For a while I have been convinced this was not drawn in Paris. For a while I was convinced based on the evidence Plath left, that it was drawn in Madrid. She wrote in a 7 July 1956 letter to her mother, "If only you could see me now, sitting in haltar and shorts seven stories high above the modern tooting city of Madrid on our large private balcony with gay blue-and-yellow tiles on floor and wall-shelves, pots of geranium and ivy, and across, baroque towers and a blazing blue sky even now, going on eight p.m. Ted is inside writing on another fable and I just finished a detailed design ...

Locations of Three Sylvia Plath Drawings Identified

Back in 2020, an unfinished drawing by Sylvia Plath appeared, and sold, via auction . The winner was a lucky person, as Sylvia Plath drawings are rare and unique. The drawing does not appear in 2013's Sylvia Plath: Drawings . The reason being it first appeared at auction in 2006, so it probably was no longer in Frieda Hughes' possession as was the case with the rest of these drawings that were part of the Mayor Gallery exhibition and sale. Likely as not because there was so little information about it; though there are unfinished and unidentified works included in that book. Annually, around May for some reason, I search for this church. Plath's life is so well-documented that one practically knows her whereabouts for any given day. Using her letters and journals and pocket calendars, I created a list of all the times she mentioned drawing or sketching something in an effort to trace this unfinished village church scene. Based on what is visible, I did not think it was Engl...