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FLORENCE PASH HUMPHREY HOLLAND (BRITISH, 1862-1951)
Portrait of Ethel Mannin
signed 'Humphrey Holland' (lower right)
pastel
58.5 x 47.5cm
Provenance
The Pastel Society, Royal Institute Galleries, Piccadilly, London;
Private collection, UK
Exhibited
London, The Pastel Society, Royal Institute Galleries, 1930
| Estimate: | £300 - £500 |
| Hammer price: | £450 |
Footnote
Ethel Mannin was political activist, novelist and travel writer. Many of her beliefs came from her father who was a member of the Socialist League; she described the depth of the philosophy she inherited from him as '...deeper than any politics or party policy, it was the authentic socialism of the Early Christians, the true communism of 'all things in common' utterly and tragically remote from Stalinism.' Her memoir of the 1920s, Confessions and Impressions, was one of the first Penguin paperbacks selling well to wide critical acclaim.
Initially a member of the Labour party, she become disillusioned and sought a harder political line to exercise her left-wing ideals. She was a passionately opposed to Fascism and supported the Spanish Republic while opposing WWII. In her 70s she described herself as a 'Tolstoyan anarchist'.
Her personal life was complex, marrying and divorcing twice, she also had affairs with W.B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. An intense and restless intellectual she claimed that 'All outside compulsion is wrong...inner compulsion is the only value.'