Restoration Conversations magazine

Restoration

Conversations

ISSUE 9, SPRING 2026

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES

From the Editor

Issue 9 of Restoration Conversations homes in on the quest of modern-day women, as they strive to bring

little-known voices to wider audiences, including author Sarah Dunant, through The Marchesa, her book

on unstoppable Renaissance ruler and trendsetter Isabella D’Este. In ‘Sirens Without Surnames’, musicologist

Antonella D’Ovidio reveals the world of seventeenth-century female musicians – their training, professional

networks and the stigma associated with performing on stage for pay.

In the issue’s ‘Women on the Frontline’ section, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi shares a story of friendship

and resilience in war-torn Gaza, examining the work and all-too-short life of photojournalist Fatma Hassona,

co-protagonist of Farsi’s groundbreaking documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. ‘This Work

Refuses Silence’, reveals two sides to sculptor Nicole Farhi’s practice: her very focused portraiture series,

including J’Accuse and Children of Gaza, along with her larger-scale abstract ‘fragments’ of human figures

which give full rein to the imagination.

We shine a spotlight on artist and philanthropist Francesca Alexander, an Anglo-American expat in late

nineteenth-century Florence, and Juana Romani, who achieved international renown as both painter and

model at the 1903 World’s Fair and beyond. At London’s Freud Museum, curator Vanessa Boni helps us to

identify unexpected affinities between Freud and surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, while at Tate Britain,

curator Hilary Floe illuminates the multi-faceted work of photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller.

Contemporary artists Silvia Infranco and Cyrielle Gulacsy, from Italy and France respectively, share

their art journeys from gardens to the cosmos, as they prepare for future exhibitions at Florence’s Museo

Sant’Orsola and Villa Il Palmerino. Gulascy’s techniques are in conversation with cyanotypes by nineteenthcentury

botanical illustrator Anna Atkins, whose creative ingenuity is uncovered in the article ‘Blue Prints’.

Textile artists and family relationships are at the forefront of Restoration Conversations, with the Relative

Ties exhibition at The Women’s Art Collection in Cambridge, which spotlights generations of the Nicholson

women along with contemporary artist Katie Schwab. In Florence, Il Palmerino Cultural Association is set

to exhibit textile works and book art by Tuscan artist Elena Salvini Pierallini, in Other Gardens, co-curated

by her daughters Sibilla and Beatrice.

Another daughter working to safeguard her mother’s creative legacy is Mary Engel, director of the Orkin/

Engel Film and Photo Archive, and her interview – paired with that of French curator Anne Morin – unpacks

the cinematographic power of Orkin’s still-photograph series.

Above: Sete, leggere trame (Thirst, light plots), from the ‘Libri in Piedi’ series, Elena Salvini Pierallini, ESP

Enjoy the issue!

Fondly,

Linda Falcone

Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations

Managing Editor

Linda Falcone

Design

Fiona Richards

Contributing Editor

Margie MacKinnon

Publisher

Calliope Arts Foundation, London

www.calliopearts.org • Instagram: @calliopearts_restoration • YouTube: Calliope Arts

Spring 2026 • Restoration Conversations 3

CONTENTS SPRING 2026

RESTORING FEMALE LEGACIES

6 Forces To Be Reckoned With

Renaissance Women: From D’Este to Dunant

14 Sirens Without Surnames

Women musicians in seventeenth-century Italy

22 The Illusion of Time

Major retrospectives for photographer Ruth Orkin

29 Other Gardens

Art by Elena Salvini Pierallini

36 It Runs in the Family

The legacy of the Nicholson women

WOMEN ON THE FRONT LINE

44 “This Work Refuses Silence”

A conversation with sculptor Nicole Farhi

52 “Hope is a Dangerous Thing”

An interview with director Sepideh Farsi

58 Not Just a Pretty Face

Lee Miller: Model, muse, photographer, war correspondent

68 An Alternative Reality

Inside the mind of Leonora Carrington

ARTISTS REDISCOVERED

Above: Installation Photography of Lee Miller at Tate Britain, 2 October 2025–15 February 2026, from Jean Cocteau’s ‘Le Sang d’un poète’.

© Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. Ph. © Tate, Sonal Bakrania

74 Garden Inspirations, From Root to Sky

Infranco and Gulacsy see art as a quest

82 Blue Prints

Anna Atkins’ cyanotype impressions

86 Scattered Tuscan Songs

The life and art of Francesca Alexander

92 A Chance Encounter with Juana Romani

Sweet dreams and tragic heroines

4 Restoration Conversations • Spring 2026 Spring 2026 • Restoration Conversations 5

Forces To Be

Reckoned With

Renaissance Women: From d’Este to Dunant

Renowned British author Sarah Dunant is

known for her writing featuring strong,

independent women in important

Renaissance centres. From In the Company

of the Courtesan and Sacred Hearts, to In the

Name of the Family and The Birth of Venus,

her novels are laced with thorough research

and knowledge of the period. They make for

a wonderful journey into the worlds of figures

who, more often than not, are left out of

history books. Her latest novel, The Marchesa,

explores the fascinating life of Isabella d’Este, art

collector extraordinaire, ruler and accomplished

manipulator. This is no romp through 15th

century and early 16th century Mantua; instead,

we are party to the very real highs and lows of

life as a noblewoman, the luxuries as well as the

limitations that come with governing a small,

but powerful city-state in a time of great turmoil.

Of all the Renaissance women whose stories

have survived to the present day, Isabella’s is

perhaps one of the most well-documented. It is

unusual for us to know so much about women

of this period, as their lives are normally handed

down to us through the annals of history, and

recorded solely in terms of whom they married,

how many children they had, and when they

died. Rarely are we afforded a glimpse into

their passions, jealousies, their grief, and the

challenges they faced – but we know their lives

were extremely complex, even precarious. In the

case of Isabella d’Este, however, there is a surplus

of ‘data’ recounting her legacy. Staggeringly, she

penned some 33,000 letters. They contain rare

and fascinating glimpses into her life and served

as the main source for Dunant’s book.

We are introduced to Isabella in the first

person, speaking directly to us from Dunant’s

pages. From the very start, we become a silent

confidant to this forthright young woman, who

acknowledges, in no small part, her skills with

scents, “I have always had the most sensitive

nose … Even as a child I registered the way

perfumes and bodies fused together. As an adult,

Left: Titian, Portrait of Isabella in Black, 1530s, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Source: Wikipedia


When speaking on the book in November 2025

at The British Institute of Florence, Dunant said

of Isabella that “her voice was too strong”. It’s

as if she, the author, had no choice but to let

this woman speak through her pages; “her

personality is in the letters.” Isabella’s strength

of character and the clarity of her voice is what

inspired Dunant to write her narrative with

Isabella’s ghost looking over the shoulder of

‘The Scholar’, a woman visiting the archives in

Mantua to research the letters. Throughout the

book we jump between these archives and the

life of Isabella, as she defends her actions and

describes the vicissitudes of her eventful life.

Intelligent, conscientious, cunning, determined

and incredibly manipulative, the Marchesa was

certainly a force to be reckoned with. By Dunant’s

own admission, Isabella is a cross between

Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Anna

Wintour. This is not to say that she has been

cast in a negative light as some sort of villain,

or ‘difficult woman’. Instead, we are transported

into her world and led to see it as she did, and to

see her, according to the mores of her own time.

Whilst depicting Isabella’s story, Dunant drew on

a familiar quote by LP Hartley in The Go Between,

“the past is a foreign country; they do things

differently there.”

Above: Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, 1503–1506, Alleged portrait of the two sisters: Beatrice (left) and Isabella (right), in the ceiling fresco of Palazzo

Costabili’s Sala del Tesoro, near Ferrara. Source: Wikipedia

I could identify each of my ladies with my eyes

closed and smell my husband when he was two

rooms away.”

In this first ‘conversation’ with Isabella, she

proclaims, “I was an expert in perfumes and

designed and gifted scents for women of good

families all over Italy and beyond”. We are

immediately transported into the realms of

‘informed imagination’, where historical fiction

– when written as intelligently as Dunant’s

– teases the senses and evokes forgotten

experience. “History is only the words,” Dunant

remarks, when considering how much is lost to

us, when all we have to show for a woman’s life

are account books and letters – pen and ink on

paper. Yet, through Dunant’s first introduction

to Isabella’s character, we can imagine the rose

water, the lavender – the ointments and lotions

Isabella or her ladies-in-waiting would have

made from steaming and steeping various herbs

and flowers. Scent, a sense so strongly connected

to memory, seems a fitting start to this journey

into 15th-century Mantua otherwise inaccessible

to the 21st-century Renaissance enthusiast.

References to the senses are threaded

throughout The Marchesa, where the sights,

sounds and textures of the past come alive on

the page. From the cravings for sweet marzipan

fruits from Naples (a favourite of the Marchesa’s)

to the sight of the horrors of the sack of Rome

in 1527, Dunant brilliantly recreates the delights,

terrors and struggles of Isabella’s world.

Above: Lorenzo Costa, Isabella d’Este in the Kingdom of Love, 1504–1506, Louvre, Paris. Source: Wikipedia


Above: A view of the reconstructed studiolo in its present state, but with its seven paintings now at the Louvre. A still from the demo-video

Isabella d’Este: Virtual Studiolo, part of the IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive project

“My job,” Dunant explains, “is to help you, the

reader, understand that soil.”

We are guided to contemplate Isabella’s

character as a whole – the jealousy she felt

towards her beautiful younger sister for marrying

into the more prestigious and wealthier Sforza

family, her love for her eldest son in his infancy,

and her later management of him as regent. We

are with Isabella when her second child, another

daughter, sadly dies after only 8 weeks. Isabella

describes a deep “chill” surrounding this birth,

which ultimately drove her to leave the city,

only to return once the child had died. Whilst

her relative coolness might be heartbreaking

today, we are reminded of how Isabella’s world

was a very different place than ours. Boys were

essential for a happy, or rather ‘secure’, dynastic

marriage, and one was not enough. The more

the safer, if not the merrier.

As far as happiness was concerned, art was

essential to Isabella. Together with fashion – for

which she was the trendsetter of her day – art

was one of her main sources of joy. She clearly

found collecting a thrill, and her collection

alludes to her knowledge of the masters, both

of the classical world and of her own. She was

keen to show it off as well; modesty does not

seem to have been in her vernacular.

A patroness with a passion for beauty and

an eye for quality, she left her mark as a

shrewd and determined collector. Isabella’s

magnificent collection was comprised of

paintings, sculptures, books, coins, instruments

and curiosities. An inventory of the collection,

compiled in 1542 by the Gonzaga court notary

Odoardo Stivini, three years after her death,

listed over 1,600 items. Sadly, the collection has

long since been sold, lost or dispersed.

Isabella’s letters reveal the lengths to which

she would go to procure artworks. From reports

from her agent in Greece on the finding of a

classical bust of Homer (albeit missing his nose)

to her incredible gall in writing to the Pope to

inquire whether she could ‘rescue’ certain items

from Urbino when the court was mercilessly

taken over by his tyrant-son Cesare Borgia.

If not directly referenced in the novel, these

events are laced seamlessly into the story to

illustrate how driven Isabella was as a patron of

the arts. Then, of course, there are the artworks

she commissioned. So precise and exacting

was Isabella that it is no wonder her court artist

Mantegna, whilst known to be contentious in

character, was particularly so, when it came to

accepting work from his Marchesa.


Above: Author Sarah Dunant (ph. Charlie Hoptinson) and her book The Marchesa

Opposite: Rubens (after Titian), Isabella in Red, c. 1605, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Source: Wikipedia

The Marchesa was the first to house her

treasures within her very own studiolo, or

rather studiola to use the feminine, and

grotto(a). Today, these spaces are comparable

to a ‘study’, where the most precious personal

items in the palace were kept and flaunted to

any renowned guests, to boost the host’s ego.

Whilst not uncommon to the upper echelons

of Renaissance society, a studiolo was usually

reserved for the collections of its lord, rather

than its lady. Isabella, however, commandeered

and decorated two small rooms in the palace

in Mantua, where she kept her most treasured

possessions. It was where she wrote, and stored

her most private correspondence.

Whilst today there is not much left, except

the shell of the physical space itself, the room

has been brilliantly recreated by researchers

at IDEA (Isabella d’Este Archive) and faithfully

reconstructed digitally. Dunant’s words and these

visuals, afford us the opportunity to be immersed

in the world of this intrepid art expert.

Because of Isabella’s strong connection to the

visual arts, Dunant, quite rightly, was adamant

that her novel include images. When met

with resistance from publishers on account

of the cost of printing a novel with colour

illustrations, some of Isabella’s fire appears to

have rubbed off on the author. She took the

bold step to self-publish, determined in her

aim to do justice to Isabella’s tastes and artistic

ventures. Whilst this edition may be slightly

harder to find in bookshops, it can easily be

ordered online. Apparently, nothing will stop

Isabella, or Dunant, from achieving something

when they put their minds to it, and for that,

we, as their audience and admirers, should

give thanks. May their fire fuel us to follow

their example in our own endeavours.

ELEANOR WALKER


Sirens

Without Surnames

Women musicians in seventeenth-century Italy

The previously unknown stories of female singers and musicians in seventeenthcentury

Italy speak volumes about their networks and experiences. Thanks to a four-year

research project called VidiMus, conducted at four universities across the country, these

women’s voices are beginning to emerge, in a polyphonic chorus that can no longer be

silenced. Participating scholars uncovered more than one hundred women ‘in service’ as

musicians and singers, known as virtuose, who worked in Florence, Rome and Bologna in

the 1600s, and they believe there are more awaiting discovery. In this interview, Antonella

D’Ovidio, the project’s co-coordinator, author and Musicology professor at the University

of Florence, shares her team’s ground-breaking music-based research on an era in which

women were still stigmatised for performing on stage.

Restoration Conversations: How did this largescale

research project on virtuose begin?

Antonella D’Ovidio: Like many projects, VidiMus

was born by chance. I began by studying musician

Lucia Coppa, whose name I chanced upon while

studying Marquis Filippo Niccolini’s music

patrons in the Niccolini family archive. All that

was known about her was that she was Roman and

among Frescobaldi’s top students, as a cembalist,

who appears to have been highly esteemed,

but not famous. From there, I abandoned what

I was studying to concentrate on Coppa. I was

lucky, because I found a document describing

a formal gift the Marquis bequeathed to the

singer, which included land and houses, as well

as all of his music books and a series of musical

instruments, some of which were very precious.

While studying Coppa, I started asking myself if

a system of patronage existed in Florence for

musicians like her, within private families who had

female musicians on staff. Music research in the

city is always very focused on the Medici Court,

but what was happening in other aristocratic

families is not widely known, in part because

many of their archives are still in family hands,

and not easily accessed. After further research,

I contacted several colleagues specialised in

the 1600s. We sought and received a grant from

the Italian Ministry of Culture, through the PRIN

project, dedicated to primary-source research.

Above: Nicolas Regnier, Divine Inspiration of Music, c. 1640, LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art


Right: Orazio Gentileschi, Young Woman Playing a Violin, 1612,

Detroit Institute of Arts. Source: Wikipedia

RC: How do you go about studying virtuose and what are

some of your most exciting findings?

ADO: In the 1600s, there was a continual exchange between

Florence and Rome, involving music, female musicians and

opportunities to train and work, which we have been able

to analyse and document. Sometimes our research begins

with nothing more than a name. A note that says ‘Caterina

sang today, here at home’ might be all you find in a family

archive. So, the process usually starts with a first name,

because these musicians’ surnames and place of origin are

not often cited. From there, we look at baptismal records,

documents belonging to the family with which the musician

was associated, we look for who her godparents were, and

so on, until we locate the first elements of her story. I found

a Signora Girolama and reconstructed the majority of her

career, but I have not been able to find her surname.

One of our grant researchers, Chiara Pelliccia, found

singers among the girl foundlings at the Innocenti Institute

in the 1600s. In a word, she was looking for Caterina’s

surname, and had the intuition to search in the Innocenti

Archive, where she found letters attesting to the fact that

Caterina Cappelli was sent to Venice to sing. Venice is where

opera was born, and by the mid-Seventeenth Century

Venetian entrepreneurs were seeking female singers, as it

became apparent that an opera’s fortune depended on the

skill of its women singers.

RC: How were these women trained and what kind of

music did they perform?

ADO: Usually at age 13 to 15, Florentine virtuose were sent

by these families to study in Rome, often accompanied

by their mothers, or sometimes their brothers. It was

convenient to find a female music teacher for the virtuosa,

and to have her take room and board at the musician’s

home. A ‘respectable’ set up of this kind protected the

girl’s reputation and that of her sponsor. Before our project,

scholars had no idea how this mechanism worked, but

we’ve been able to uncover important correspondence on

the management of these virtuose. For instance, we found

one letter, penned by the Florentine ambassador, which

provides an update on a girl’s training. “Angiola Soci” –

another virtuosa we discovered – “is progressing well. She

sings very well, but is ashamed to sing in public; she is still

a child.” Other interesting letters describe how costumes

for performances were sent to girls by the Medici Court.

In fact, we found that families with musicians ‘in service’

would often loan them to courts to perform.

We know very little of the repertoire these virtuose

played or sang, not because we are lacking the written

Above:


Above: Cristofano Allori (attr.), Portrait of a Woman, allegedly Francesca Caccini, 1610–20, location unknown

music, but because we do not know how it was

used and in which contexts. Of the manuscripts

that have survived, there are no notes saying ‘This

music was sung by so-and-so’. There are some

exceptions, of course, like a wonderful document

called Il manoscritto della Signora Cecilia, because

it can be directly linked back to a specific virtuosa

who performed it. In other cases, there is no direct

correlation. We know they often sang arias, for

one or more voices, for instance. Many of these

women performed as part of a duo – this was

often true for sisters – but it is an aspect we do

not yet fully understand.

RC: I’ve recently read up on Francesca Caccini,

court composer for Medici Grand Duchess Maria

Maddalena of Austria, and the first woman to

compose an opera – or a musicalized work of

theatre. Though she tries to secure her daughter’s

future as a virtuosa, it appears that Caccini was

not favourable to her daughter working in the

theatre. Was this an issue of ‘reputation’? Did

women singers and musicians come up against

the stigma of being considered ‘a courtesan’, as

was the case with actresses, until well into the

nineteenth century?

ADO: For a seventeenth-century woman,

‘reputation’ was fundamental. With some

exceptions, a woman who ‘exhibited her body’

through stage performances, either as a singer

or an actress, was considered within everyone’s

reach and at everyone’s disposal. Of course,

we are talking exclusively about the male

perspective, of men watching and hearing women

sing, including their attention to gesture and the

physicality of singing. Consider that chronicles

Angelo Solimena, Saint Cecilia or Allegory of Music, XVII century. Private collection


Above: Bernardo Strozzi, The Viola da Gamba Player, portrait of composer Barbara Strozzi, c. 1630s,

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Source: Wikipedia

from the Seventeenth Century and beyond were

penned exclusively by men. In them, women’s

voices were compared to ‘a siren’s song’. A siren

strikes you; she seduces you, but she is also the

one who puts you in chains, so there is this dual

register of the female voice as ‘angelic’ but also

as enchantress and seducer. The singer’s voice

and body ‘on display’ made women seductive in

the eyes of men, which automatically undermined

the solidity of their character in the minds of

audiences.

This courtesan stigma was especially strong

in the 1600s, with the advent of opera in Venice,

because that was the first time women performed

on stage in front of a paying audience. This is

not to say that women who exhibited in private

salons with a select group of invited guests

were not accused of being courtesans as well.

Barbara Strozzi, an excellent musician and an

extraordinary composer, never sang opera;

she never sang on public stages, but she often

faced this accusation. Strozzi was a member of

academies and salons, and she performed during

Accademia degli Unsoni’s gathering, sometimes

paired with academic dialogues and musical

performance. Strozzi received many accolades for

being a highly skilled player and composer, but she

was also known for her conversational abilities –

a trait that cannot be trivialised, because in these

salons and academies, the men were always the

ones to introduce the topics up for discussion.

Despite being ‘an exception’, Strozzi still had to

carry the weight of the ‘courtesan’ label.

RC: The results of this study are accessible online

via the digital archive VidiMus, created by AND

Ambienti Narrativi Digitali (Digital Narrative

Environments), where users can download

information on a certain virtuosa, including her

entire network of relationships. Tell us more.

ADO: We focused on reconstructing the

relationships these virtuose had with family

members, as in the case of the daughters or wives

of musicians. We looked at their professional

relationships, with teachers, or other composers,

musicians and patrons. The traces these women

left behind are few and far between, so there is no

direct route to reach them. We have to reconstruct

the entire network in which they worked. From this

small step, we can begin to think about the music

of the 1600s in a different way. The rediscovery

of women musicians has always passed through

the junction of women composers, but there were

many different levels of multi-talented women,

even those who practiced several artforms, like

Giovanna Garzoni and Arcangela Palladini, who

were painters and musicians at the same time.

In fact, we’ve found it was quite common for

the daughters of female painters to be trained

in music. We want this project to press beyond

women composers, to other kinds of women

musicians in this period. The vast majority of

them are still awaiting discovery.

LINDA FALCONE

Antonella D’Ovidio, professor of Musicology

and the History of Music at the University

of Florence, co-coordinated VidiMus (www.

vidimus.it) with three other principal

researchers, Arnaldo Morelli, Nicola Badolato

and Teresa Maria Gialdroni, as a partnership

among universities in Florence, Aquila, Bologna

and Rome Tor Vergata, respectively.


The Illusion of Time

Major retrospectives for photographer Ruth Orkin

Until July 2026, the

retrospective exhibition

Ruth Orkin: The Illusion

of Time is on show in Bologna’s

Palazzo Pallavicini, following major

European exhibitions over the

last five years, in France, Spain,

Portugal, Hungary and several

other stops in Italy. This interview

begins with insights from French

author and curator Anne Morin,

who is one of the driving forces

behind Orkin’s European debut,

via her Madrid-based cultural

management company DiChroma

Photography which co-produces

exhibitions worldwide.

In the second part of the article,

we hear from Mary Engel, Orkin’s

daughter, who has been promoting

her mother’s work for nearly four

decades. Mary, a documentary

filmmaker and director of the

Orkin/Engel Film and Photo

Archive, is pleased with Orkin’s

newfound recognition in Europe

and reflects on her mother’s

‘chutzpa’ (passion and drive).

Ruth Orkin, Jinx and Justin on Scooter, Florence, Italy, 1951, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive


Left: Ruth Orkin, Mother and Daughter on Suitcase,

Penn Station, New York, 1947.

Courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

These interviews, conducted separately, but

‘in conversation’ here, tribute the woman

behind the lens of the iconic photograph

American Girl in Italy, originally published

in Cosmo magazine in a 1952 article entitled

‘Don’t be Afraid to Travel Alone’. Judging by

how Ruth Orkin used her camera, she was

not afraid of much.

Restoration Conversations: Work in the

archives is often fundamental to bringing the

achievements of women photographers to

the fore. How did your relationship with Ruth

Orkin develop, as you continued to study

her?

Anne Morin: Once you get into the archives,

there’s the chance to go really deep, like an

archaeologist. As soon as you start spending

a lot of time with photography, the works

begin to whisper things; they tell you stories,

and you begin to understand the character of

the photographer behind the work and her

nuances. I always say to myself, “Let’s listen

and get a sense of the work’s secret.” As you

have said, a curator is someone who takes

care of an artist. It’s like being a gardener. You

have to make sure that your plant receives

enough light, enough water, so that it can

begin growing into a beautiful tree. It takes

time, but if you set out to do it, you have to

continue in the best possible way. I developed

that kind of relationship with photographer

Vivian Maier. I have my ‘own’ Vivian Maier. I

am very fond of her, and I take care of her

the best way I can. I want to make sure we do

right by her. With Ruth Orkin, it’s the same.

RC: You’ve often said that when you started

studying Orkin, the view you had of her work

was “extremely narrow”. Can you tell us more

about that?

AM: At first glance, I did not understand

that she wanted to ‘create cinema’ with her

camera. Only later, did I realise that she

had adopted some of the same principles

underpinning experimental films that

emerged in Paris in the 1950s, with Nouvelle

Vague cinematographers – no set, no written

script, no big money. It was very experimental

for that time. Ruth’s daughter, Mary Engel,

approached me about her mother some years

ago. “Come to my place in Union Square, and

let’s see what you think,” she said. I spent

hours there, and finally said, “I see the ghost

of the cinema in her pictures.” That was

when Mary told me that Ruth had not been

able to become a filmmaker, despite wanting

to. Women at the time were supposed to

be feeding the American dream by being

actresses, not by making the movies in which

they starred. Ruth worked on Little Fugitive,

in 1953, with her husband Morris Engel, and

it was a huge revolution. As I explored that

film, it opened up a new dimension on Ruth’s

work in my mind. She could not get into

cinema through the front door, so she found

a window, and invented a very specific kind

of photography. No one else behind a camera

talks about cinema like she does.

RC: If you were to choose one photograph

that you would like to have on public view and

in the minds of people, which would it be?

AM: There’s one picture of a mother and her

daughter seated on suitcases, who seem to

have been waiting in a train station for hours.

The mother looks very tired, and the daughter

is leaning on her. The image is so simple, but

powerful. I can imagine Ruth wandering by

and being touched by that scene – maybe

as a mother. There is nothing more beautiful

than a little daughter having a rest on her

mother’s shoulder. I love this picture. Orkin

focuses our attention on the many wonderful

things around us. This ‘ability to see’ is an

exercise, of course, but her work reminds me

of Alphonse Daudet, and the idea that poets

and children don’t look at the world, they

discover it. Orkin truly had the capacity to

discover beautiful things that we might not

see by ourselves.

RC: At the Bologna show, I felt that Orkin’s

work takes moments we recognise – like

images of a man petting a dog or a woman

scrutinising a statue – and uses them to

tap into collective memory. I often go to

shows and wonder, “How can I relate to this?

Where does my own experience fit in here?”

In this case, I felt at home. Ruth Orkin put


there is absolutely no distance between her

and Einstein; there’s no distance between her

and children playing cards. It’s exactly the

same. She’s very natural, and that is a true

power. She does not fear anything or anyone.

Restoration Conversations: Mary, thank

you for agreeing to share insight on your

mother. What is your take on Anne Morin’s

claim that your mother was fearless in her

photography? Can you tell us more about her

character and how it shaped her work?

Mary Engel: My mother had chutzpah, in a

good way – and a sense of adventure. At just

17, she decided to travel across the country

alone [on a journey that was part bicycletrip

and part hitchhike]. It’s not that she

convinced her parents to let her go on the

trip. She simply didn’t ask for permission. She

put a note on the table, hooked up with a ride,

and then called them about 50 miles out of

LA, saying, “I’m going to New York.” So I think

if you need a portal into who Ruth Orkin was

at 17, she was self-assured, confident and not

willing to listen to anybody except her own

inner voice, and what she wanted to do. It is

a telling anecdote about who she was, and

she carried that attitude through her life. Her

parents may have been beside themselves,

but they also trusted her on some level. Keep

in mind, her mother had been in a vaudeville

trio, and had travelled around the country, so

the idea was not completely foreign. Ruth had

a lot of drive, passion, and a lot of interests.

Portraying people was her specialty. “I take

pictures to show people how I see the world,”

she used to say. That’s who she was.

Above: Ruth Orkin, Two American Tourists, Rome, Italy, 1951, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Right: Ruth Orkin, Jinx and Justin in MG, Florence, Italy, 1951, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

humanity out in the open, and it felt like there

was something very unifying in her body of

works – the simple experience of humanity. It

may not be a complicated concept, but it’s not

very common today.

AM: To borrow an idea from Victor Hugo, Orkin

finds the extraordinary in the depths of the

ordinary. Many photographers travel to the

ends of the earth, in search of situations that

are exotic or astonishing. By doing so, they

distance themselves from our daily life, which

is actually full of marvellous details like the

ones Orkin collected and captured. Ruth was

living in New York, which is a very seductive

city full of visual stimuli, but she was not

drawn to the homogeny of modernism, ‘the

big’, ‘the high’ and so on. Rather, she collected

small details of ‘extraordinary things’ that all

too often are considered trivial. In her lens,

there is no need to go far to find poetry. She

is honest in her art – honest with herself.

RC: Tell us more about how Ruth handles the

protagonists of her photographs, because

Jimmy Telling a Story, and Girls Reading a

Comic Book have the same communicative

power as images of iconic individuals like

Einstein laughing, or Spencer Tracy on the

film set.

AM: “Exactly! They’re all on the same level.

When Ruth gets close to someone via her

camera – whether on the street, or at the

terminal station, or in that world of cinema

where everybody is an icon – there are no

categories, no social classes. She simply

embraces whatever is in front of her, and


Other Gardens

Art by Elena Salvini Pierallini

Above:, left: Ruth Orkin, Albert Einstein at a Princeton Luncheon, Princeton, New Jersey, 1955, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive;

Above, right: Lauren Bacall, St. Regis Hotel, New York City, 1950, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

RC: The Bologna show is very focused on

Ruth’s ground-breaking work in creating

‘common ground’ between photography and

cinema. Can you tell us more about that?

ME: Her theme of always shooting in series,

as if she were shooting film is evident in all

her series, which I aways point out to people

interested in her work. When my mother

was a messenger girl at MGM in 1943, she

wanted to become a director or filmmaker in

Hollywood, but the cinematographer’s union

wouldn’t let a woman in. In her diary, or one

of her books, she wrote, “I was too early”, and

she was absolutely right. She was too early.

But she never lost her cinematic sensibility,

and she brought that to photography. Ruth

(Mom) shot stills in series, in a cinematic

style, because that’s what she wanted to do.

She was the first girl messenger at MGM; the

‘Hollywood glitz’ was fun, but it was her job,

not her life. Her life was not glamorous; it

was the Great Depression, and her parents

were on relief. She actually went back five

years later, and shot what her experiences

‘would have been like’ as a messenger girl.

But the point is that she was far ahead of the

curve, in terms of innovation, and ultimately,

she tries to bridge the gap between moving

pictures and still pictures.

RC: There has been increased interest in

your mother’s work in recent years, can you

tell us more about it?

ME: During her lifetime, my mother probably

had 25 shows, and several books were

published about her work. She was widely

acknowledged, but never received the big

grants, or as much recognition as she would

have liked. But she died young, at 63. In fact, I

just bypassed her age this year. Although she

had exhibitions all over the United States, she

never debuted in Europe during her lifetime.

Only recently, and because of Anne, she’s had

the exposure in Europe. It’s really thrilling. We

had no books on her for 40 years, and now

all of a sudden, we have six new books out,

and a couple more are on the way. Right now,

she has a show on in Washington as well, at

the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

I’m trying to keep up with everything, and my

work strives to keep her pictures in the public

eye. She had a lot of people who loved her

work, you know? And it just continues.”

LINDA FALCONE

Elena Salvini Pierallini – ESP, ‘Libri in Piedi’ on the steps of San Miniato al Monte, 2001, ph. Davide Virdis


From ‘upright’ artbooks to time-lapse photographic series and larger installations, Florentine artist

and photographer Elena Salvini Pierallini – known as ESP – produced a multi-faceted oeuvre, that

was more than fifty years in the making. From June 15 to September 21 at Cultural Association Il

Palmerino, the artist’s works will be on show in a retrospective exhibition entitled ‘Other Gardens:

Art by Elena Salvini Pierallini’ curated by Giovanna Giusti, in collaboration with the artist’s daughters.

Throughout the summer, ESP’s art will be at the centre of several city-wide events, hosted at historic

villas, archives and cultural centres, known for their strong connection to the history of women from the

sixteenth-century to the present day.

The artist’s daughters, architect Beatrice

Pierallini and Sibilla Pierallini, an archaeologist

turned Art History teacher, share insight on the

sources of ESP’s inspiration, and reveal how they

were inspired by a mother who, in their minds,

‘vivified everything she touched.’

Restoration Conversations: ESP began as a

textile artist, working with embroidery. How did

she get her start and what can you tell us about

her early work?

Sibilla Pierallini: Our mother was introduced

to embroidery by her mother, who worked as an

embroiderer of tablecloths and tableware. ESP

produced designs for her mother until the age

of fifteen, after which she decided to transform

embroidery into an independent art form, with

no other purpose than to be viewed as art on

the wall. ESP often depicted medieval symbols

or portrayed scenes of human labour, because

she found them representative of the European

identity. Italy is a constellation of Roman

cathedrals, and the same is true of France,

Germany, and Spain – from the Path of Santiago

to Jerusalem. These cathedrals host iconography

associated with the passing of nature’s seasons

and people at work throughout the year – themes

that inspired our mother’s early work. In the

1960s and 1970s, ESP’s art featured many cultural

symbols, from pastoral scenes to the signs of

the zodiac, and technically, her works had two

layers. On the top layer, made of organza, she

embroidered, and on the silk layer underneath

it, she’d paint.

Beatrice Pierallini: One interesting work of

embroidery is her birds in flight, that become

trapped in a spiderweb. ESP always loved to see

birds soaring through the sky, as it gave her a

sense of freedom. Yet, she was very conscious

of the limits human beings have to grapple

with – and women especially, for cultural and

historical reasons. She identified with those

birds trapped inside a web, and the work refers

to the albatross in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal.

In that metaphor, when an artist flies high, he is

majestic, but once he lands and finds himself in

society, he is ungainly, clumsy. As an artist, ESP

recognised the world’s constrictions. She always

yearned for freedom of thought and action, but

like many women artists in her time, she often

found herself having to set aside her art to meet

the demands of daily life.

RC: In the mid-1990s, ESP took a step back

from embroidery and began working with

other materials, like recycled or natural objects,

including seashells, re-used plastic, and vintage

fabrics passed on to her by her mother, used in

combination with her photographs. Tell us more.

SP: She was always taking photographs; some

were candid scenes, and others she assembled

as still-life compositions. They were unique, and

she put things together that were not usually

associated with one another. She loved onions,

for instance, and was struck by their colour, their

layers – even when they were rotting. ESP had

the ability to see things without prejudice and

to find their beauty, when anyone else would

have simply tossed over-ripe vegetables into the

Above: Elena Salvini Pierallini – ESP, Birds and Spiderwebs, 1989–1990. Private collection


rubbish bin. Blackened bananas, wilting Swiss chard

– anything could be immortalized as a celebration

of colour. ESP considered cooking a waste of time;

so while in the kitchen she produced artworks!

That’s how she was; she always transformed

her circumstances, and taught us to interpret

our surroundings without preconceptions, by

adopting a sense of curiosity. She taught us to see

that discovery is the enjoyment of the unexpected.

RC: What can you tell us about ESP’s diaries, or

Smemoranda?

BP: She started working with datebooks in the

1970s, and by the mid-1980s she produced them

assiduously. She was committed to producing one

diary page a day, as an exercise and a pastime that

she found enjoyable. It was a moment she had to

herself. We have 40 of these image diaries. At day’s

end, she would say, ‘Do you want to see my little

page?’ ESP was always keen on sharing her work

with us, as children and in our adulthood as well.

RC: ESP’s series called Libri in Piedi, or ‘Books on

their feet’, will be exhibited this summer in ‘popup’

events, at two monumental venues, Florence’s

National State Archive (June 15 to June 22) and in

the garden at Medici Villa La Quiete (July 2), as

temporary extensions of the ‘Other Gardens’ show

at Il Palmerino. Tell us more about the series.

BP: Our mother was very interested in book art,

and she created books to flip through, and upright

books as installations, called Libri in Piedi. As a

person of great vitality, who vivified everything

around her, ESP wanted to give books the dignity

of standing upright like human beings; she wanted

them to be able to ‘walk’. In her mind, every object

has its own life experience and personalised

memories. She worked with collage, using images

from magazine clippings she collected in sets,

with topics like ‘people reading’, ‘frogs’ and ‘hands’.

She’d combine these clippings with her own

photography or pieces of found objects she liked,

and then, used thread, as a unifying force in her

work. In her mind, art was a visual experience; she

associated analogous forms and shapes to create

a visual story, a narrative, that did not need to be

explained or theorized.

Above: Elena Salvini Pierallini – ESP, Agende Smemoranda datebook series from 1980s to 2018, ph. ESP


on building an alternative reality made in the

image and likeness of her own desires. Elena

loved the writings of Voltaire and referenced

his views in her art: since humans lack any kind

of existential certainty – being at the mercy of

the gods – our only alternative is to cultivate

our interests. She believed in reaching beyond

frustration, and pursuing a gratifying life, one of

fulfilment. This energy is very strongly reflected

in her work.

LINDA FALCONE

The ‘Other Gardens’ exhibition at Il Palmerino,

and its side events at Villa La Quiete, MAD

Murate Art District, New York University at Villa

La Pietra, and Florence’s National State Archives

form part of a larger three-year project ‘Florentine

Gardens: Women Expats and Artists of Today’,

organised by Il Palmerino Cultural Association

and Calliope Arts Foundation, in collaboration

with the British Institute of Florence. For the

complete programme associated with Elena

Pierallini Salvini’s Florence exhibition and

related calendar, visit: www.calliopearts.org.

Above: Elena Salvini Pierallini, From the ‘Murabile’ wall series, Still Life with Onions and Bananas, detail, 1995, ph. ESP

RC: For more than a decade, ESP organised events

among Florence’s local art community, inviting

artists to complete art books she produced and

handed out as part of her Borse Nere (Black

Bags) initiatives. At a former Florentine convent

turned contemporary art centre, we will host a

similar event this summer, in collaboration with

MAD Murate Art District. Today’s artists will

gather to complete several books ESP produced

and left unfinished. How does Borse Nere work?

SP: During each of Borse Nere’s several editions,

ESP invited twenty to thirty artists she held in

high esteem, and sought to produce art in a

collective or ‘choral’ way. It became a performance

of sorts. Her incomplete art books were tucked

inside the huge black bags she gifted to her

peers, which was meant to symbolize the artists’

subconscious. Here is what ESP wrote about

them: “These bags are containers of thoughts,

images, memories and projects, anger, fear,

nostalgia, colours and beauty”

Inside the bag, artists put whatever they

liked – their tools perhaps, or some sources of

inspiration. These events involved a lot of showand-tell

among the artists, and with the public

at large. We are delighted for the opportunity

to relaunch mother’s black-bag idea. Artists will

receive their bags at Villa La Quiete in July, and

then present their works at MAD Murate Art

District, three months later, in September.

RC: ESP is an eclectic artist and photographer,

whose work largely escapes classification. How

would you describe your mother’s oeuvre in a

nutshell?

SP: As an artist, ESP was interested in construction,

never destruction. Her work was not an act of

denouncement, or a criticism of society. She had

an absolute respect for animals and the natural

world, and they feature predominantly in her

work no matter the medium. On some level,

her oeuvre is Matisse-like, in that she focused

Above: Elena Salvini Pierallini – ESP, Mare d’Inverno (The Sea in Winter), 2013


It Runs in the Family

The legacy of the Nicholson women

Relative Ties, the current exhibition at the

Women’s Art Collection (WAC) at Murray

Edwards College in Cambridge, explores

the work of four women of the Nicholson family.

Successive generations of Nicholsons have

produced numerous artists, among whom the

best known are William and his son Ben but, in

this show, the men are not the principal players.

Here, the focus is on the artistic output of the

Nicholson women, as well as on the relationships

between them, and the ways in which they

influenced and supported each other. As curator

and Director of the WAC Harriet Loffler explains,

“the exhibition explores what women inherit

from their mothers, what can be passed down

matrilineal lines, and the importance of siblings

to a creative practice.” The exhibition also

includes new works created by Katie Schwab

(see p.41).

It starts with Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-

1918). The two portraits of her children on

display exemplify the focus of her work and

the restrictions on her output. Descended from

generations of painters and engravers, Mabel had

four children with her husband William, whom

she met at art school. A devoted mother, she

temporarily stopped painting while her children

were young and ultimately managed to complete

no more than 50 works. Her use of her children as

models, dressed in theatrical costumes or posed

in domestic settings, encapsulates her success

at fusing her art practice with motherhood. Her

fondness for dark backgrounds was thought to

be influenced by Manet, and, while she would

have been aware of the new trends emerging in

the late Victorian art world, she did not subscribe

to any one in particular. One of her most notable

achievements was to encourage her daughter

Nancy’s creative leanings.

Unusually, Mabel paid her children when they

sat for her works. For Nancy Nicholson (1899-

1977), this was an early lesson in independence

and equality. At just eight years old, she identified

as a suffragist, during the First World War she

joined the Land Army and, on marriage to the

writer Robert Graves, kept her own name –

contrary to the prevailing practice. Nancy began

her artistic career as an illustrator and later

began experimenting with textile printing. After

separating from her husband, she set up Poulk

Press where she produced her own stationery

and printed designs for her brother Ben and his

second wife, Barbara Hepworth.

Elsie Queen (Myers) Nicholson (1908-1992),

who preferred to be called ‘EQ’, was the daughter

of privilege, growing up in a home surrounded

by servants and regularly visited by writers and

artists. Her paternal grandmother was Eveleen

Right: EQ Nicholson, Runner Bean, c. 1950, wallpaper, © Estate of EQ Nicholson, private collection


EQ’s daughter, Louisa Creed (b. 1937), did not

immediately follow in the footsteps of her

artistic forebears. Instead, she pursued a career

in music, becoming an accomplished flautist.

However, her chance discovery of the craft of

rag-rug-making led to a second career which

began in 1989. Largely self-taught, she has

created over 200 rag rugs, helping to revive

a skill that was in danger of dying out. The

influence of her family’s artistic background is

evident in her style, her choice of subjects and

her economic but effective use of colour.

Louisa’s rugs – which are meant to hang on

the wall – are handmade and have a painterly

quality. Two were directly inspired by paintings

of her aunt Winifred Nicholson. Her own designs

are simple and reflect an interest in the natural

environment, not unlike the designs of Nancy and

EQ. Louisa’s gift to the WAC of one of her rugs,

Hunting Cat, together with EQ’s painting, Jugs and

Quinces (1946), was the seed that has grown and

ultimately flowered into this exhibition.

Winifred Nicholson’s granddaughter, Rafaele

Appleby, explains the effect of the family legacy

Above: Installation view, ‘Relative Ties’ curated by Harriet Loffler, featuring works by Louisa Creed, ph. Jo Underhill

Myers, a self-taught photographer credited with

more than 200 photographic portraits in the

National Portrait Gallery. EQ’s formal art training

was somewhat sporadic, but a stint as an assistant

to textile designer Marion Dorn provided

sufficient experience and self-confidence for

EQ to begin creating her own designs. After her

1931 marriage to Kit Nicholson, Nancy’s younger

brother, EQ worked on interiors commissioned

through Kit’s architectural practice and, from

1936, began working with Nancy.

Despite the nine years between them, Nancy

and EQ became very close, as evidenced by

their correspondence over 20 years, now in the

archives of Tate Britain. They shared an artistic

sensibility that was linked to the domestic

sphere and their common delight in gardens

and the natural world. Both women became

single mothers, and their work reflected their

familial preoccupations. Over the years, they

produced designs for textiles, prints, stencils

and wallpapers, taking satisfaction from creating

objects that were both practical and beautiful.

While Nancy refused to allow her designs to be

machine-produced in order to preserve their

handmade quality (some of the lino blocks she

used are displayed along with her patterns),

EQ did not eschew commercial production.

Black Goose, was screen-printed by Edinburgh

Weavers, and Runner Bean, one of her bestknown

designs, was used for hand-printed

wallpapers by Cole & Son.

Nancy Nicholson’s great-great niece, also

called Nancy, is a textile artist working in Devon

who creates woven designs for wall hangings and

rugs. Growing up, she was surrounded by objects

created by various family members, and she

knew of the older Nancy’s formidable reputation

as an artist and non-conformist. On viewing the

exhibition, she observed, “It is wonderful to see

so much work from these four women on show,

but I was struck most by the descriptions of the

creative force in Nancy and EQ’s friendship. I

knew they were both impressive individually,

but the cumulative force of a creative female

friendship is a powerful thing and Relative Ties

does a brilliant job of making the story of this

one so tangible and alive.”

Above: EQ at work on a batik bedspread c. 1932, photographed by Kit in their flat in Chelsea Embankment.

The palette on the wall belonged to Mabel Pryde, Kit’s mother


on her art practice in Cumbria, where she creates

vibrant works inspired by nature: “Over the years,

as I discover more about the women artists in my

family, I am struck by one thing: that for them art

is collaboration, sometimes by working on the

same project together, at other times creating

images that spark new ideas across the studios,

across the years, across the generations.

“Mabel wove motherhood into her work with

such deft brushstrokes that you feel her love

for the children she painted. Nancy was feisty

and quite able to stand up for herself without

losing any subtlety in her work. EQ’s work is less

familiar to me, and I loved meeting more of it

in the exhibition. I am so happy to count her

daughter Louisa, who taught me how to make rag

rugs, among my friends. As I work in my studio I

feel their steady encouragement around me. It is

time for these wonderful creative women to step

out of the shadows and into the light.”

MARGIE MACKINNON

The catalogue that accompanies the Relative

Ties exhibition was supported by the Calliope

Arts Foundation.

Hanging by a

Thread

A conversation with artist Katie Schwab

In the beautiful catalogue that accompanies

the Relative Ties exhibition, Harriet Loffler

explains that she wanted to connect the

skill, style and resourcefulness of the Nicholson

women to our present moment. To this end,

the WAC commissioned contemporary artist

Katie Schwab to explore how creative legacies

are inherited through matrilineal lines. “I’ve

always wanted to work with Katie,” says Loffler.

“We met 25 years ago on a youth engagement

program at Tate Modern, shortly after it

had been established.” The exhibition and

Schwab’s commission became a collaboration

between Harriet and Katie as they explored the

archives relating to Nancy and EQ. Restoration

Conversations sat down with Katie to find out

how the commission evolved.

Restoration Conversations: The Nicholsons

were and are a particularly artistic family. Was

yours a similarly creative family?

Katie Schwab: Yes, art was very much a part of

the environment I grew up in. My grandmother

had studied textile design in Berlin before

emigrating to the UK in 1939, and she continued

to sew and embroider throughout her life. Both

my grandparents also undertook evening classes

at what is now the Camden Arts Centre (in

London)—my grandmother in ceramics, and my

grandfather in painting. My mum did a Fine Arts

degree as a mature student in the 90s and was

painting, drawing and printing when I was young.

RC: When I first heard about your commission

for Relative Ties from Harriet, it seemed you had

been thinking of making a rug. Another idea

was to make paper from dried flowers from the

Murray Edwards College garden which would

then be hand printed. In the end, you created a

porcelain sculpture, a calendar tea towel and a

three-dimensional hanging mobile. How did that

come about?

KS: This project has journeyed through many

different materials and processes. After learning

about Louisa’s and EQ’s rugs, I was excited about

the idea of making a tufted work for the show.

I had previously made three tufted rugs for a

show in Plymouth. But as Harriet and I looked at

the Nicholson works in the Whitworth archives

[in Manchester], there were other pieces that

started to resonate alongside these rugs. The

idea of developing relationships between

artworks seemed more relevant to the project

than making a single work.

I became interested in the recurring motif of

the ribbon in Nancy’s work, and EQ’s painting

of dying plants in the garden. Nancy had also

made designs for plates which got me thinking

more about ceramics. For the exhibition I made

a pit-fired porcelain cast of a pleated ribbon that

I had found in my great-grandmother’s sewing

box. This object resembled a fossil and spoke to

me of things passed on and the spirals of time. I

also gathered the ash from that pit firing which I

hope to make into a glaze for a new work to be

shown when the exhibition moves to York.

Above: Stencils used by Nancy Nicholson for her Waddling Duck design, c. 1939, © Estate of Nancy Nicholson, private collection

40 Restoration Conversations • Spring 2026


Left:

RC: So, that piece has really taken on a life of

its own?

KS: Yes, it feels like the project is now generating

its own sense of time and circularity.

RC: You have designated the commissioned

works, collectively, with the logogram ‘&’ or

ampersand. What is the thinking behind that?

KS: That’s funny. I’ve actually never said the

title of the work out loud, because I think of

it very much as a written symbol that takes a

form on the page. The use of the ampersand

is a reference to Nancy’s work for Poulk Press,

where she produced cards and letterheads

on an Adana tabletop printing press. She was

playful with how she used type, and on one of

her Christmas cards the ampersand appears like

falling snow. I liked this idea of language being

used sculpturally, and was also interested in the

connective role of the ampersand in sentences.

RC: The symbol itself is convoluted; it’s not a

straightforward sort of connection …

KS: Exactly, I think that the form of the

ampersand echoes the movement of the metal

sculpture, the spiral in the ceramic work, and

the curve of the ribbon typeface in the calendar

tea towel.

RC: When you have a family business that is

handed down from one generation to another,

it will often be called something like ‘Smith and

Sons’ and that ‘and’ is visually represented by an

ampersand.

KS: Yes, that’s true. And although it doesn’t

happen often, I like it when you see a business

name with ‘& Daughters’.

RC: Tell us more about the mobile. When did you

get the idea to base it on your son’s drawing?

KS: In the Whitworth archives we came across

one of EQ’s sketchbooks which featured her

sketches on one side, and children’s drawings

on the other. I started to think about the ways

in which home life and studio work are often

intertwined. My three-year-old son draws all

the time, and I have stacks of his drawings

which I’ve held onto. I wanted my work for the

show to acknowledge that presence of family

life in both my work and the work of Mabel, EQ

and Nancy Nicholson.

So, I created a steel sculpture from one of

his drawings with David Stupple at Cow Sike

Workshop in the North York Moors. It was tricky

to join and balance the metal rods and the

inclination was to weld them together or fasten

them with wire. In the end, we joined them with

pink cotton cord. I wanted to bring a textile

language back into the work, and the cord gave

the piece both strength and a gentle movement.

“What Katie and I learned at the Tate, all those

years ago now,” recalls Loffler, “was about looking

at artworks. It was about unpacking, very simply,

what is it we’re looking at? And, when I think

about this with Katie Schwab’s sculpture, what

we’re looking at is a suspended steel sculpture

based on a drawing by her son. It’s this constant

swirl of line on a page, those lines that never

end. And it’s hanging by a thread that holds the

whole piece together.”

MARGIE MACKINNON

Above and right: Installation views, ‘Relative Ties’ curated by Harriet Loffler, phs. by Jo Underhill and ‘Home and Garden’ works by Mabel and Nancy Nicholson;

Installation by Katie Schwab: New Year, 2026, and Mobile, 2026


“This work

refuses silence”

A conversation with sculptor Nicole Farhi

Above: Nicole Farhi’s Children of Gaza series, 2025, ph. Alexandra Dao


Nicole Farhi left her hometown of Nice, in the south of France, to study fashion and

art in Paris in the late 1960’s. From there, she moved to London where she eventually

started her award-winning eponymous fashion brand. She has since left fashion

behind to concentrate on her artistic practice, with a focus on sculpture. As an artist

who feels compelled to respond to life’s joys and despair, Farhi meets the human

condition head on. Here, she talks to Restoration Conversations about her practice

and some of her recent projects.

Restoration Conversations: After your

successful career in fashion, you decided to

devote yourself full-time to your first love, art.

Why were you drawn to sculpture in particular?

Nicole Farhi: I have been sculpting since the

early 80s. Sculpture was never something I ‘turned

to later’. It existed alongside my primary career

in fashion. Fashion absorbed a lot of energy

and visibility, but sculpture remained constant, a

practice in private during the time that belonged

to me. I loved painting, but nothing compares to

the physical truth of sculpture. The pleasure of

putting my hands in clay, of making something

that will have a presence in our space, that’s when

I feel at home.

RC: What was your training and who were your

major influences?

NF: Through a friend, I met the sculptor Jean

Gibson in 1983, I went to her evening classes

twice a week for two years. The second year, while

casting my first bronze at The Royal College

Foundry, I met Eduardo Paolozzi who became

my friend and mentor. He gave me assurance in

myself as a sculptor.

One of my main influences is Alberto

Giacometti. His work is about distance, fragility,

the impossibility of understanding fully the

human presence; he taught me that sculpture

is an act of questioning, not affirming. Another

important influence is Germaine Richier. Her work

leaves us uncomfortable, it is totally honest, it is

Left:

Above: Nicole Farhi with her J’Accuse series, a statement against wrongful accusation and the miscarriage of justice, ph. Iona Wolff


“I am drawn to the sensuality of flesh, to

the emotional charge carried by a pose,

and to the abstract forms that emerge

when the body is truly observed rather

than described.”

Nicole Farhi

Nicole Farhi’s sculptures, Virevolte and Pile ou Face, from the series Shapeshifting, shown at the ‘Second Lives’ exhibition, 2025, phs. Iona Wolff

about violence, vulnerability and deformation,

it is about being alive. Then there is Auguste

Rodin, who totally freed the body in his sculpture.

Through his love of clay, movement, tension and

emotion remain alive. And, as an artist who

shows us freedom to construct sculpture away

from convention, there is no one like Picasso;

his approach to sculpture is different. It is radical,

playful, irreverent.

RC: Art practice seems like a very solitary

occupation to me. Did you or do you miss the

collaborative aspect of working in fashion?

NF: I have never experienced sculpture as a

solitary practice. It is intimate when it begins

but never solitary. When I work, I am in constant

dialogue with the material, the clay is not passive,

it responds, my thoughts become physical. And

when the sculpture is done, it moves from my

studio to a foundry, and there it goes through

many hands. Casting involves technicians, mould

makers, metal experts … sculpture is really a

collective process.

RC: You recently took part in a group show in

London called Second Lives, featuring artists who

are better known for an earlier or parallel career

in a field other than art. Your pieces in this show,

which are large, semi-abstract forms, seem to be

a departure from your portraiture work.

NF: Alongside portraiture, there has always been

another strand in my work – one that moves away

from the face and toward the body. I am drawn to

the sensuality of flesh, to the emotional charge

carried by a pose, and to the abstract forms that

emerge when the body is truly observed rather

than described.

Even when the work is large in scale, I rarely

think in terms of the whole. I work through

fragments. I zoom in on a shoulder, a back,

the curve of a thigh, the tension in a hand. By

isolating parts, I try to reach something essential

– the way flesh holds emotion. Through

fragmentation, I come closer to abstraction.

These fragments are not reductions; they

are intensifications. They allow me to focus

on what makes us human – weight, softness,

sensuality, resistance, vulnerability. When

the body is partially isolated, it stops being

illustrative and becomes a landscape, a rhythm,

a structure. The viewer completes it mentally,

physically, emotionally.

RC: Your portraits include a series of small

busts of famous writers and actors. Another

series focusses on individuals, both historic

and contemporary, who have been wrongly

convicted, then later exonerated. That series

takes its name, J’Accuse, from Emile Zola’s

1898 open letter to the president of the French

Republic about the wrongful conviction for

treason of army officer Alfred Dreyfus, in which

antisemitism played a major part. What was the

impetus for that series and how has it been

received?

NF: J’Accuse was born out of outrage and

responsibility. I wanted to confront the violence

of wrongful accusation – the moment when

institutions fail and a human being is reduced

to a case, a suspicion, a verdict. Sculpture felt


inherit. I do not minimise the horror of October

7th, nor the murder of Israeli children. That

trauma is real, and it is part of my history too. But

acknowledging that suffering cannot become a

justification for the destruction of other children.

Children do not belong to a ‘side’. They do not

choose borders, ideologies, or wars. When they

are wounded or killed, the tragedy supersedes

any political interpretation. To look at their

faces is not to take a position in a debate, but

to acknowledge a shared humanity that exists

before – and beyond – ideology.

The choice to focus on Gaza is not an act of

exclusion, but one of proximity. Artists do not

respond to the entirety of the world’s suffering;

they respond to what arrests them, what they

cannot turn away from. Silence, too, is a position

– and this work refuses silence.

This work is about children. Children are never

responsible for the violence that surrounds them.

When they suffer, the question is not ‘why here?’

but ‘how did we allow this to become normal?’

The Children of Gaza asks for something simple

and difficult: to look, to stay, and to remember

that compassion does not require neutrality – it

requires recognition.

RC: Unlike the figures in J’Accuse, the children in

this series remain unnamed. Why did you make

that choice?

NF: Only two of the ten children I sculpted are

named in the Press photographs I encountered.

The absence of names is part of the tragedy.

The violence of disappearance. I decided not

to individualise the sculptures through naming,

because none of these works stands for one

child only. Each figure is carrying the weight of

many lives lost or damaged. These ten children

are symbols in the deepest sense of the word:

fragments of reality that point beyond themselves.

MARGIE MACKINNON

Above: Nicole Farhi in her studio, ph. Iona Wolff

essential, because it restores weight, presence,

and dignity to people who were denied all three.

Each bust insists on individuality. These are not

symbols or abstract injustices; they are faces that

demand to be looked at. The title J’Accuse is, of

course, a declaration – not only against judicial

failure, but against indifference.

The reception of the series has been deeply

moving. In London and Edinburgh, audiences

responded with an intensity I hadn’t anticipated

– not only intellectually, but emotionally. People

stayed, read, returned, brought others. Many

spoke of recognition rather than shock. The work

continues its journey: the series was shown in

Bristol in March. That sustained response tells me

something important – that there is a profound

need, today, for work that insists on moral

attention without spectacle.

RC: Tell us about your latest series of busts, The

Children of Gaza.

NF: This series was not conceived as a political

statement but as a human response. These busts

do not seek to explain a conflict, assign blame,

or claim moral authority. They insist instead

on presence. Each face is an act of attention, a

refusal to allow suffering to remain abstract,

distant, or reduced to numbers. Because I am

Jewish, I am deeply alarmed by the erosion of

compassion. Jewish history has taught us where

the dehumanisation of civilians – especially

children – leads. When I see it repeated, even in

my own name, I cannot remain silent.

What is happening in Gaza confronts us with

an unbearable reality: the systematic destruction

of civilian life, and above all the lives of children

who bear no responsibility for the world they

Above: Girls from Nicole Farhi’s Children of Gaza series, 2025, phs. Alexandra Dao


“Hope is a

dangerous thing”

An interview with director Sepideh Farsi

Iranian filmmaker and director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk documents

her video conversations via WhatsApp with Fatma Hassona, a young photojournalist living

under siege in Northern Gaza. Hassona was a 25 year-old woman who had completed a degree

in multi-media at the Islamic University of Gaza. Her curiosity opened her up to the world beyond

her borders, and her cultural influences included Virginia Woolf and The Shawshank Redemption.

She was looking forward to receiving a book about fellow photojournalist Lee Miller, a gift from

Sepideh: “I was supposed to give it to her. I still have it.” One day after the film was accepted

to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Hassona and five of her siblings were killed in a drone

attack on their home. Sepideh sits down with Restoration Conversations to share the backstory

and the aftermath of her award-winning film, and its legacy of friendship and resilience.

Above: Portrait of filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, ph. © Aris Ramos

Restoration Conversations: Put Your Soul on

Your Hand and Walk is largely filmed as an online

dialogue between you and Fatma Hassona, over

the course of one year. What made you decide to

make this film the way you did, and how did you

and Fatma come together?

Sepideh Farsi: I was traveling around the world

with my animated film, The Siren, when the

October 7 attacks happened. I felt the need to

react to the situation as a filmmaker and address

the absence of the Palestinian point of view in

the media. This biased kind of mediatic landscape

bothered me, and I decided I would go to Cairo, to

try and pass through Rafah into Gaza, which was

very childish of me, because, obviously, at that

point, in April 2024, it was already too late. And

perhaps even before that, because access to Gaza

has been systematically denied to journalists and

filmmakers for a long time.

So, I started filming Palestinian refugees who had

left Gaza. Initially, I wanted to film it documentary

style – holding my camera, with my subject at

arm’s length. I’ve done other documentaries, in

Iran, without being granted permits to shoot, like

Tehran Without Permission (2009), which I filmed

‘underground’ using a low-resolution mobile.

This time, it was my physical presence that was

not tolerated. Then, Ahmad, one of the young

Palestinians I was filming said, “A friend of mine

in Gaza is a great photographer and an amazing

person. You should meet her.” It seemed like an

opening, and that’s how it started.

RC: Can you describe your thoughts while making

the film? Was Fatma involved in the filmmaking

process?

SF: We set up our first meeting and I filmed it

right from the start. There was an immediate

bonding between us, and I saw that she – and

our conversations – were going to be really

special, and central to the film. I shifted into

this way of filming, because it gave me a far

more intimate way of sharing her testimony. I

wanted the two perspectives of the film, [mine

and hers], to be at the same level, to have the

same [visual] resolution.

We did not discuss the filming process. I was

the one guiding, and I would throw in ‘the seeds

of our conversation’ and see how she would

respond. She was a photographer, and not filming

videos when we met. But she started filming

some videos at my request. I asked her for a long

travelling shot and she filmed the video that ends

the film. It was complicated for her to achieve it,

but after some time, she managed. Emotionally, it

would have been taxing for her to get behind ‘the

steering wheel’, in terms of making the film with

me, because she was inside chaos.

RC: It is horrifying and frustrating to see these

atrocities being documented in real time. In the

past, there was always a lag – sometimes of years –

before the public might become aware of certain

events. The media has mainly been excluded,

but because of people like Fatma taking pictures,

and thanks to her conversations with you, these


documents now exist. As a documentary

filmmaker, are you motivated by the need

to record what is happening? Do you hope

it will lead to some kind of change? And

if so, do you feel you’ve been successful?

SF: The fact that I am an Iranian exiled

filmmaker certainly played a part in how

I felt the need to do something in real

time that might help shift things. The film

is still in high demand, but the world has

this false notion that the situation has

calmed down in Gaza, when it hasn’t. In

some ways, it’s worse because people

aren’t paying as much attention to it. I was

surprised by the scale in which the film

has touched people, and at how much

it has been traveling. At the same time,

I think I was kind of expecting more to

change in response to the film. When it

got selected for Cannes, I thought, “Wow,

we did something together that is quite

unique, and we are going to break down

a wall.” I was also expecting Fatma to be

able to join me. I was trying to get her out,

and then, we would have presented the

film together. When she was killed, I had

to come to terms with the fact that I had to

present the film by myself.

RC: Do you think Fatma’s participating in

the film was the reason she was killed?

SF: We know she was targeted, but we

don’t know exactly why; it could have

been because of the film, but also because

she was getting more and more attention

as a photojournalist and we know that

Israel targets Palestinian journalists. In

Gaza, for the first time, we are seeing

images of genocide instantly, and the

people creating them are killed. More

than 300 journalists and media workers

have been murdered in Gaza, and it is still

happening. This conflict is not new, it goes

back hundreds of years, but this level of

atrocities and killings is unprecedented.

RC: Tell us more about your experience

as an exiled Iranian activist and filmmaker.

Did it inform your choices in this film?

Above: Scene in Gaza, ph. Fatma Hassona, from a series shot over 18 months, from October 2023 to April 2025


Scenes in Gaza, phs. Fatma Hassona

Above:

Above: Film still of Fatima Hassona, from Put Your Soul on Your

Hand and Walk, ph. © Rêves d’Eau Productions

SF: I left Iran one week before its electoral fraud

and uprisings in 2009 and that was my last trip.

Once I reached Paris, I asked myself, “Should I

return to Iran or stay out and do something from

abroad?” I stayed in Paris and finished Tehran

Without Permission and other films that cross

the regime’s red lines, such as Red Rose. If I go

back now, I will be arrested. This reality made my

reaction to Fatma being locked down inside her

country even stronger. Having decided to leave

my own country, I could understand why Fatma

would not leave hers. At one point, she told me,

“Everything happens for a reason”, and I said, “I

wish I could agree. I would love to believe it, but

I can’t.” She was so open-minded in accepting

my scepticism. “Oh, I feel you,” she said. Her

gentleness – the gentleness with which we

shared differing viewpoints – is what I think was

one of the achievements of the film.

RC: The film is like an open space for dialogue,

for empathy. We know Fatma never watched the

film. Do you think she would be happy with it?

SF: It’s hard to say how she would have felt about

the film. The thing is that the film exists. Without

it, we would have lost her – the main part of her

story. Had she not sent her photographs to me,

most of them would have been destroyed. The

feeling I’m trying to express is strange, because

there is the satisfaction of having achieved

something with her, despite all the odds and the

fact that she is not here to see it. Through the

film, people get to ‘meet her’ in a way that goes

beyond what would have been possible had she

been here herself, because, certainly, her death

increased the level of attention her work and the

film have garnered. We cannot ignore that.

There are days I want to run away from it, and

others when I think I have to keep accompanying

it, although it’s kind of devouring my whole

existence. Everybody sees me as the continuum

of that duo, half of which has been erased,

because of her being killed, so I am talking for

the both of us, because she is not here to answer.

RC: From the very beginning, Fatma’s smile was

magnetic and iconic, but at a certain point, it felt

as if she realised that the extent and ferocity of

this conflict was not the same as in the past. Did

you sense a shift in her, as she began having to

fight to retain her optimism?

SF: Fatma’s smile was always very strong, but it

had different shades and different meanings. I

learned to decipher it. Sometimes it was a real

smile of joy, but it also expressed anger and

sadness, or pride. Her smile was all she had. She

summarised her state of mind and her resilience

in the first few minutes of our first meeting: “I

am proud”, she said, and “They can’t defeat us,

because we have nothing to lose”. That’s it. This

already sets the landscape of her life, the scale of

her life, and the scale of her resistance – and that

of many Palestinians.

I didn’t want a statement from her on October

7. I wanted to see how she felt about it, and if she

realised it was a turning point that would topple

her world. There were times she couldn’t talk or

think about it. That explains her smiling and her

living the way she did. A monster will paralyse

you, if you look directly at it, but if you ‘ignore it’,

you might regain your freedom of movement. I

think that is what she was doing, and what she

ultimately tried to tell me.

This documentary is part of her legacy, because

it is her words, her presence, her smile and her

texts and photography and our relationship and

friendship – all of that, our feelings. And yet

her testimony is multiform, because she sent

messages to other media outlets prior to her

killing, in which she said, “I want a loud death”.

That means she must have been conscious of the

risk she was taking, although we didn’t talk about

it, because we always talked about life, never

about death.

MARGIE MACKINNON & LINDA FALCONE


Not Just a

Pretty Face

Lee Miller: Model, muse, photographer,

war correspondent

A comprehensive exhibition of the work of photographer Lee Miller

(1907–1977) has drawn sell-out crowds to Tate Britain. It covers her

work behind and in front of the camera, from fashion shoots (of and

by her), surrealist photos, including some featuring the ‘solarisation’

technique she helped to develop, and gritty scenes of London

during the Blitz, the grim revelations of concentration camps and the

devastating aftermath of the Second World War across Europe.

From an early age, Miller’s natural beauty attracted the attention

of men from whom she learned about fashion, modelling, theatre,

photography and art – but whose own fame in their respective

fields often overshadowed her efforts. She got her start working as a

model with publishing mogul Condé Nast, and her first appearance

in Vogue was on its cover. When she decided to pursue a career in

photography, she presented herself to up-and-coming photographer

Man Ray in Paris and announced that she was his new student,

refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer. On returning to New York three

years later, she launched her own photography studio and made a

name for herself as a portraitist. Soon afterwards, unwilling to settle

into a routine and craving new adventures, Miller married wealthy

Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved with him to Cairo.

Her excursions into the deserts of North Africa produced some of

her most innovative work.

Right: Lee Miller, David E. Scherman Dressed for War, London 1942. Lee Miller Archives



On her inevitable return to Paris, she fell in with

the surrealist crowd which included Max Ernst,

Leonora Carrington, Man Ray (again) and Roland

Penrose, whom she eventually married. Exhausted

and traumatised after her experiences as a war

correspondent, she retreated with Penrose to a

farmhouse in Sussex where they entertained

members of the artistic and intellectual avantgarde

and raised their son, Antony. Growing up,

Antony knew almost nothing of his mother’s

accomplishments, and it wasn’t until after her

death that boxes containing more than 60,000

photographs and negatives were unearthed in the

attic. Antony and his wife Suzanna established

the Lee Miller Archive which now contains the

carefully catalogued collection of negatives, prints,

letters and other ephemera left by this uniquely

talented woman.

Curator Hilary Floe shares her insights about

the artist and the exhibition with Restoration

Conversations.

Restoration Conversations: Tell us about your

approach to curating the show. With such a wealth

of material, it must have been difficult to choose

what to include and what to leave out.

Hilary Floe: Yes, there was a true abundance of

riches. With around 20,000 vintage prints in the

estate alone, plus our determination to bring

works from elsewhere, we had to be painfully

selective. We tried to make those decisions by

balancing works that have become quite iconic,

like the Portrait of Space (1937) and Lee Miller in

Hitler’s bathtub (1945), with ones that have rarely

or never been seen before – so that there would

be both the ‘anchors’ and the ‘discoveries’ for

wherever you are in your Miller journey. We tried

to have an object-led show.

RC: Can you explain what you mean by ‘objectled’?

Above: Lee Miller, Model Elizabeth Cowell Wearing Digby Morton Suit, London 1941. Lee Miller Archives

Above: Installation Photography of Lee Miller at Tate Britain, 2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved.

leemiller.co.uk. Photo © Tate, ph. Sonal Bakrania


Right: Installation Photography of Lee Miller at Tate Britain,

2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026. © Lee Miller Archives,

England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.

Photo © Tate, ph. Sonal Bakrania

HF: We tried to forget all the narratives around

Miller’s life, to lock those away in a little box in our

minds, and to select her most creative, ambitious

and powerful works. Then we thought about how

to naturally group them together so that they

would sing in harmony. And we combed through

documents about her life, looking for insights to

help us understand the works we’d chosen.

RC: How did you deal with some of the more

practical curatorial challenges? How do you draw

people into an exhibition of relatively small images

which are almost entirely black and white?

HF: We gave a lot of thought to that! We were

dealing with a large exhibition space at Tate Britain,

across 1000 square meters. It helps that Miller’s

work is extraordinarily varied and that it takes you

on a dramatic journey through different genres

and times. Our architects, Gatti Routh Rhodes, used

colour and created sequences of openings and

closings within the gallery spaces to tease visitors

into seeking out what comes next. But we didn’t

want to get too playful with the design because the

show includes some desperately serious material.

Also, we used Miller’s own words in the exhibition

texts; she was a compelling writer, and it was a way

to continually bring her voice to life.

RC: Can you give us an example of some of the

photographs that were exhibited for the first time?

HF: There are two wonderful images of Syria

from the mid-1930s which show remote scenes

from Miller’s travels. One is a study of ancient

ruins in Palmyra taken from a distance in such a

way that they almost look like the surface of the

moon. Another is of a village with quite strange

vernacular architecture, probably formed out of

mud, with bulbous tower shapes that look vaguely

fleshy, like a bodily organ. We had been doing a

particularly deep dive into Miller’s years in Egypt

and her travels around North Africa and we found

these in the archives in a [rare] uncatalogued box.

Miller’s life in Egypt has attracted less attention

historically.

Above:Lee Miller Untitled, Northern Syria near Turkish boarder 1938. Lee Miller Archives

RC: In Paris, Miller began as Man Ray’s apprentice

but soon became his collaborator, notably in the

development of the solarisation technique, in which

62 Spring 2026 • Restoration Conversations 63

Above: Installation Photography of Lee Miller at Tate Britain, 2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved.

leemiller.co.uk. Photo © Tate, ph. Sonal Bakrania

Above: Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa 1937. Lee Miller Archives

a negative is exposed to light while only partially

developed, reversing its tones and creating a

dreamlike effect. Ray seems to have been given

most of the credit for their shared solarised

images. Is that an accurate assessment?

HF: The artists at the heart of the surrealist and

modernist movements were all looking very

closely at each other. People tend to assume that

when there are two very similar works by Miller

and Man Ray, that Miller’s work is a response

to his. But maybe Ray is responding to Miller.

We can’t be certain which one came first, and

sometimes we fall into the assumption that he

was leading, and she was following. Despite

our archival detective work, a lot of questions

regarding attribution remain.

RC: You mentioned the picture of Miller in

Hitler’s bathtub. One reviewer noted that, while

this is probably Miller’s most famous photograph,

it was not actually taken by her. Is that a fair

observation? Should Miler be credited solely with

the accompanying photograph of her colleague

David Scherman, also posing in the bathtub?

HF: There are some common misunderstandings

about that photograph. The attribution is complex.

We credited the two portraits to both, but they

were taken on Miller’s camera, not Scherman’s.

They have nothing to do with any other work

that Scherman made and were published in

Vogue [Miller’s employer] with her credit, not in

Life magazine [for which Scherman worked]. So,

I think there is every reason to believe that she


Left: Lee Miller, Untitled (Man and tar), Paris 1930.

Lee Miller Archives

conceptualised those images and that Scherman was a

collaborator. I would resist the idea that if a person is in

a photograph, they can’t be its author.

RC: Why do you think this image continues to have

such a powerful effect on viewers?

HF: It is about recognising the banality of evil, the

ordinariness of someone who murdered millions of

people and the horror of recognising that you’re of the

same species. There is the act of cleansing oneself after

coming from a concentration camp; on the other hand,

you’re in Hitler’s bath, so how clean are you going to

feel? This was on a continuum of the many horrible

experiences Miller put herself through in the pursuit

of, not only art, but bearing witness during the war. I do

think she felt a moral and ethical obligation to ‘truth tell’.

When you stage a photograph of yourself in a bathtub,

that’s not straightforward documentary, but there is a

commitment to truth there, nonetheless.

RC: Following the armistice, Miller travelled to Hungary

and Romania, documenting the after-effects of the

conflict. Why do you think she carried on instead of

returning home as her partner, Roland Penrose, was

entreating her to do?

HF: As she moved across successive liberated

territories, she saw that while liberation brought joy,

the physical and psychological damage left behind was

acute. She felt there were still important stories to tell

of the deprivation and the suffering brought about by

the war. In early 1946, she wrote to her editor, “I’d rather

chew my fingernails right down to the elbow than

retreat from here until I have something positive and

convincing to say.”

RC: Will the exhibition be travelling onward when the

show at the Tate comes to an end?

HF: We are very happy that it’s going to the Musée

d’Art Moderne in Paris and then to the Art Institute of

Chicago. It is fitting because Britain, France and the US

are countries that were hugely important for Miller

herself. She had a propulsive curiosity that meant she

was constantly moving around, meeting new people,

absorbing new influences and responding very directly

to the times in which she was living. That’s what makes

her work so interesting.

MARGIE MACKINNON


An Alternative

Reality

Inside the mind of Leonora Carrington

IIn 1938, the English author and artist Leonora

Carrington (1917–2011) was living an idyllic life

with her lover, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst

(1891–1976) in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in the south

of France. Leonora wrote stories and painted while

Max sculpted fantastic creatures that adorned the

exterior walls of their small stone farmhouse.

Together, they entertained Roland Penrose, Lee

Miller, Leonor Fini, Paul Eluard and other friends

from their avant-garde circle. This idyll abruptly

ended when, in 1939, France declared war on

Germany. The German-born Ernst was interned as

an enemy alien and, although released just three

months later, he was soon re-arrested by the Nazis

and sent to a detention camp. Left on her own, but

with no desire to return to her family in England,

Leonora struggled to cope with an increasingly

desperate situation.

With the help of a friend, she made her way

to Madrid, but her mental state continued to

deteriorate. She was admitted to a sanatorium in

Santander where her treatment included a course

of drug therapy which induced violent epileptic

seizures. Her eventual escape to New York

required her to slip away from the English nanny

who had been sent by her parents to retrieve her

from the sanitorium, and to hastily marry Mexican

diplomat Renato Leduc (a friend of Picasso’s she

had met in Paris) in order to obtain the necessary

exit visa for safe passage out of Lisbon.

In 1943, Leonora wrote Down Below, a graphic

account of the unravelling of her mind in

Santander, which was published in VVV, the

Surrealist magazine. Down Below is also the title

of one of two paintings she produced during

her time in the sanitorium. A new exhibition

at London’s Freud Museum, The Symptomatic

Surreal, brings together the painting, exhibited

in London for the first time, with drawings from

sketchbooks that Leonora kept from 1939 to 1941.

These are presented in dialogue with objects

from Freud’s extensive collection of Greek,

Roman and Egyptian antiquities – archaeological

finds that embody past civilisations which, as

curator Vanessa Boni explains, “Freud used as

tools to help him think about the structure of the

mind and the unconscious.”

Above: Courtesy of the Freud Museum London. Artworks © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London. Ph. © Lewis Ronald


The Surrealists, of whom Max Ernst was an early

exponent, drew on Freudian theory in creating

works that combined dream and reality and

sought to tap into the unconscious as a way to

free themselves from the constraints of traditional

art theory and practice.

On a rainy Friday afternoon, as the trees in

the garden of Freud’s last home in London were

coming into bloom, and where his study, with its

ancient treasures, remains virtually unchanged

since his death, Boni provided further context to

the exhibition.

Restoration Conversations: How did the idea

for the exhibition come about?

Vanessa Boni: I began seriously researching

Leonora in 2022, a couple of years before I started

working at the Freud Museum. Initially, I was

looking at Carrington’s goddess imagery and

asking how her experience of the psychiatric

system, as a woman in the 1940s, may have shaped

her feminist consciousness. When I later joined

the museum, I remember standing in Freud’s study

and being struck by the proximity of goddess

statuettes on Freud’s desk and an image of a

hysteria patient from the Salpêtrière above his

couch. The exhibition evolved from that moment.

RC: Why did you choose to focus on Leonora’s

sketchbooks?

VB: In October 2024, I went to see the exhibition

Avatars and Alliances at Firstsite in Colchester,

which included one of Leonora’s drawings from

her Santander sketchbooks. When I started

looking into it, I discovered how little had been

published on the sketchbooks and I thought they

might be a way to revisit the period Leonora

described as “down below”.

RC: How did you go about tracking them down?

VB: The sketchbooks were part of a large

collection of Surrealist works owned by the

gallerist and collector Julien Levy in New York.

Leonora gave them to Levy when she arrived in

New York in 1941, having been introduced to him

by the Surrealists in exile who gathered there.

When Levy died in 1981, his wife Jean set up a

foundation to oversee the collection and, after her

death in 2003, the collection was auctioned off.

Above: Images courtesy of the Freud Museum London. Phs. Lewis Ronald © 2026. (Left: Leonora’s map of the sanatorium grounds © 2026 Estate

of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London. Right: Engraving from the Warburg Institute, London, illustrating phases of alchemical

transformation)

Above: Leonora Carrington, More Frontiers of Space, 1941. Image courtesy of Collection David Castillo & Pepe Mar, Miami Shores, USA

© 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London

RC: Was there never a thought of returning the

sketchbooks to Leonora?

VB: There is nothing in the archive about what

she was thinking when she gave them to Julien. I

don’t know if she attached any conditions to them.

I do know that she was very upset at the thought

of them being sold. They were intensely personal

to her as they were part of the most difficult time

in her life. And perhaps she didn’t see them as

artworks or expect them to be publicly viewed.

RC: Did the prospect of publishing this material

feel transgressive given its sensitive nature?

VB: As a curator working on this material, I’ve

been aware of those transgressions from the

perspective of the artist, and I have been sensitive

to this. But their ontology has changed, because

as soon as they were sold in that auction, they

became part of the art market.

RC: What sort of condition were they in?

VB: Many of the pages were crushed or torn and

folded. They have the traces of her journey from

when she left Saint-Martin d’Ardèche, then on

to Madrid, to Santander, to Lisbon and, finally, to

New York.

RC: Am I right in thinking that the sketchbooks

are never mentioned in Down Below, Leonora’s

written account of her time in Santander?

VB: That’s true. She never directly refers to

them. She does mention that one of the doctors

gave her a pencil and some paper and that Dr

Morales had encouraged her to draw as a way of

communicating to him how she was feeling. Those

drawings were separate from the sketchbooks

and are all lost.

RC: What is the significance of the exhibition title,

The Symptomatic Surreal?

VB: Freud talked of ‘symptoms’ as signs or

symbols, a way of communicating a conflict that

is going on in the unconscious. So, the exhibition

is questioning how Carrington’s images operate

symptomatically by communicating something in

an indirect way.


RC: From the opposite perspective, did you come

across any evidence that Freud was aware of

Carrington or her work?

VB: No. He wasn’t particularly interested in

Surrealism. He was interested in ancient artifacts

and the Renaissance. He wrote about Leonardo

da Vinci and Michelangelo. Salvador Dalì visited

Freud in 1938 and drew a portrait of him that

is on display on the landing. On seeing Dalì’s

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Freud commented

that, in classical paintings, he looked for the

unconscious, but in Dalì’s work, he looked for the

conscious, which Dalì took to be criticism.

RC: The various hybrid human-animals inhabiting

the grounds of the sanitorium in Santander

in Leonora’s painting Down Below, have been

interpreted as representing different aspects of

the artist. Is that just one way of looking at the

work?

VB: This may have been her way of describing

what she was going through. These ideas of

hybridity and multiplicity and metamorphosis

are interesting aspects of the painting. There is

masking as well, because the figure in the middle

has a mask as a head and another in the hand. So,

there is the idea of becoming ‘other’ or being in

between different selves.

Above: Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1940. Private Collection, Mia Kim. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

© 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London

RC: Leonora didn’t formally identify herself as

a Surrealist artist. Was she influenced by Freud’s

theories?

VB: She wasn’t actually very interested in Freud,

which I think makes her work even more compelling

at the Freud Museum. Her art resonates with

psychoanalytic ideas without simply illustrating

them. It is important to remember that Freud’s

theory of the unconscious was a major influence

on Surrealism and, while women’s contributions

to Surrealism were marginalised, Leonora and

other women artists participated in the Surrealist

exhibitions in Paris in 1938, and then in New York

in 1942. So, she was working with Surrealist ideas,

but she transformed those ideas. There was a kind

of feminist reimagining of them.

RC: Leonora’s account in Down Below makes for

difficult reading. What was your experience on

studying it so closely?

VB: It’s an incredibly intense read. Leonora shares

her experience so vividly and viscerally. Every time

I return to it, I’ve needed hours to feel okay again.

To cope with her emotional distress, she imagines

alternative realities and gives form to her crisis

through the invocation of a symbolic underworld.

Leonora’s descent has been compared to other

literary journeys into hell, like those of Dostoevsky

or [American author Joseph] Campbell, but hers is

not a final destination in a Christian sense. It more

closely resembles the ancient Egyptian attitude

towards the afterlife. Freud was also interested

in the Egyptian underworld, and he collected

many statuettes of underworld deities. Bringing

Carrington’s work and Freud’s objects together in

this exhibition draws out unexpected affinities we

might not otherwise have imagined.

MARGIE MACKINNON


Garden Inspirations,

from Root to Sky

Infranco and Gulacsy see art as a quest

Silvia Infranco, Tellus, detail made with wheat, barley, pigments, oxides and wax, 2023


Above: An installation view of Silvia Infranco’s solo show ‘Viridis’, 2023, MarignanaArte, Venice, curated by Marina Dacci

On mornings at Il Palmerino, as soon

as the weather improves, many

a landscape artist from various

corners of the globe, come to

capture its gardens, immortalised on page by

author Vernon Lee, and on canvas by painter

Lola Costa, successive owners of the Tuscan

estate, over the course of 115 years between

them. In Autumn, still-life painters delight in the

property’s overripe persimmons, or celebrate

the growth of wild poppies among its planted

flowers in late Spring. Yet the two artists at work

there most recently are looking at gardens in a

different way – from root to sky – as part of an

artist residency and production grant, that kicked

off in 2025, as part of a larger 3-year programme:

A Florentine Garden: Early Women Expats and

Artists of Today, supported by Calliope Arts

and Il Palmerino, in collaboration with Museo

Sant’Orsola and the British Institute of Florence.

Once completed, the results of artists Silvia

Infranco and Cyrielle Gulacsy’s labours will be

on display during a double exhibition event,

co-curated by Morgane Lucquet Laforgue and

Marina Dacci. It will be held at Museo Sant’Orsola

and Cultural Association Il Palmerino, in the

spring of 2027, prior to the museum’s opening

one year later. Infranco takes us on a multicentury

historical journey, in which plants, and

prescriptions derived from them, are a source

of power for women, as well as a symbol of

their vocation for caring for others, at home or

in community settings. The art voyage Gulacsy

proposes is off-planet, but it begins with a ‘bit

of earth’ and the industrious insects that help

it bloom.

Bolognese artist Silvia Infranco plucks a sage

leaf from its low-growing shrub, after having

snapped Polaroids of its growing, at different

times of the day. She crosses the garden to

the heavy wooden table that will be her work

station for the next two months. She knows

that ‘sage’ comes from the root word ‘save’, in

Italian salvia, and that it was cultivated across

the country for centuries in nunneries and

family-grown gardens, for its healing properties,

to combat inflammation, treat respiratory and

digestive ailments, and to boost menopausal

health. Silvia’s most recent research on a wide

variety of medicinal plants and their traditional

uses thanks to sources linked to ancient Greece,

including Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides,

eleventh-century poet Odo of Meung, German

abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen

and clinical physician Emile Gilbert. Next, she

searched through medieval manuscripts at the

National State Archives and the National Central

Library in Florence, which enabled her to collect

additional proof that the art of healing, in Italy,

was largely a women’s prerogative, at least until

the rise of chemistry as a formal discipline. For

this project, the vegetation she is studying to

incorporate into her artwork, either physically

or symbolically, comes from several sources.

She chooses among plants described in a

seventeenth-century Florentine manuscript,

or those pressed between the pages of Il

Palmerino’s herbarium, created by Fiorenza

Angeli, Lola Costa’s daughter, in the 1980s, now

a family heirloom. Many of the plants Fiorenza

picked and preserved are still in bloom at Il

Palmerino, and used by her daughters in home

remedies. Infranco is also studying a garden

that grew five hundred centuries earlier at

Sant’Orsola. Only the skeleton of the ancient

pharmacy where its plants were processed has

survived. It is called la spezieria, (from the word

‘spice’), where nuns mixed ointments, prepared

tonics using medicinal herbs, or crafted casts

and bandages, with wax made from animal fats

and, later, beeswax.

Infranco’s works use wax as well, and she sets

up a pot of it on her portable canister stove.

There is something magnetically appealing about

the melting of wax, and I watch her preparations

Above: Portrait of Silvia Infranco, ‘Taking Care’, ph. Alexander Christie


in silence, before the artist speaks, “My research

develops by observing how different organic

surfaces respond to events that influence their

memory. I mostly use organic materials, like

paper, wood and wax. I am fascinated with the

symbolic uses of wax, because, historically,

it was used for preservation, healing and

remembrance.”

“Process is also important in my research,”

Infranco continues. “I start by coating a wooden

base with wax, using an iron to smooth out the

uneven surface. Then I engrave the wax and dye

it with bitumen and/or natural pigments, and

then wipe off the excess. I repeat the process

over and over again, creating layers, in order

to explore the different layers of memory, and

to render them palpable.” Her final works will

incorporate plant fragments, parts of historical

written remedies, and even prayers for healing,

as she forms panels and a manuscript-inspired

installation. Silvia will use a variety of techniques

including maceration in water to create the paper

utilized in her works. “Water heals, fertilises and

purifies, but it also causes decomposition. Water,

like wax, is strongly linked to the experience of

touch, to the sensitivity of heat and cold, to the

idea of erasing or sealing, and it carries strong

symbolism,” the artist explains.

“I chose Fiorenza Angeli’s herbarium as my

starting point, because it represents the memory

Below: Cyrielle Gulacsy, Pareidolia, 2017, black ink on paper

Above: Cyrielle Gulacsy’s self-portrait with her paintings, 2025

of Il Palmerino’s garden, but it also incapsulates

the memories of her family,” Infranco says. “The

Sant’Orsola garden interests me because the

concept of care is taken further, outside the home,

and into a monastic setting. From the Middle

Ages onwards, plant medicine has largely been

in the hands of women, and chemical medicine

in the hands of men. Throughout history, the

knowledge of plants and the prescriptions

related to them – whether written or verbal –

became a source of female agency, and I strive

to record and evoke that reality in different

ways, by creating works on panel and paper, or

photographic works, book art and sculptures

that I sometimes insert in found objects.”

Not far from Infranco’s workbench, is French

artist Cyrielle Gulacsy, the project’s second

awardee, who usually works out of her Paris

studio. She is up early as well, and on the lookout

for bees, which will be the protagonist of her

Florence installation. It seems apropos, in my

own mind, as a swarm of bees was once used

as a symbol of Medici power, where Grand Duke

Ferdinando I was identified with the queen bee,

before anyone knew that the head of the hive was

actually female. Gulacsy is amused by my mention

of the historical mix-up, but her intent takes the

symbolic power of bees far beyond the dynasty’s

landscape. She is looking to capture what she

calls bees’ ‘cosmic dimension’. She shares the

tiny screen of her digital infrared camera – the

first tool used in her art production process – to

explain what she means. Bees, when captured

in infrared images, seem to mimic the light of

miniscule stars. In her eyes, bees form garden

constellations that bring the cosmos closer, right

into our own garden patch, in fact. Her plan for

the grant project is to transfer her collection of

infra-red images onto fabric; they will serve as

the base for cyanotype works, created using an

iron-salt solution, a sunbath and a water wash.


Left: Cyrielle Gulacsy, CS031, 2025, photographed by the artist

The cyanotype’s deep blue recalls the cosmos

too. If all the stars align Gulacsy hopes to

display the finished piece as a cupola-like textile

installation inside Sant’Orsola complex’s Inner

Church. No longer consecrated, this once-holy

space inside the fourteenth-century convent will

form the hub of Museo Sant’Orsola – together

with the ‘Outside Church’ and its well-preserved

excavation site – when the future museum

is inaugurated, at least in part, in 2028. Starstudded

cupolas are a well-recognised feature

in Florence, with domes at the Pazzi Chapel

at Santa Croce, and the Old Sacristy at the

Basilica of San Lorenzo having star-map motifs,

but never before have such stars been earthly

constellations, made with light emitted by

garden bees.

As far as star systems go, Gulacsy has been

studying astronomy for years. Her widely

acclaimed ‘dot’ paintings are teeming with all that

makes the heavenly bodies heavenly: light, heat

and every range of hue. At the same time, her art

stands motionless, as if frozen, once framed by

the inquiring gaze. Experiencing Gulacsy’s works

is like looking at a starry night, but in full colour,

and with no need to crane the neck. She credits

the Herschel family – John and his father William,

not William’s sister Caroline (see Issue 5), for the

latest direction her research has taken.

“William Herschel discovered infrared, by

dispersing light with a prism, to create a rainbow.

His intent was to measure the heat of each colour.

He noticed that the thermometer recorded

higher temperatures as it went from blue to

red. What surprised him was that beyond the

spectrum of visible light, temperatures became

hotter still,” explains Gulacsy. “To produce my art,

I started using infra-red photography, the same

camera fitted inside the James Webb telescope,

to investigate the universe’s beginnings. I used

it to look at our feet! Only later, after I’d already

started creating cyanotype works based on

this photography, did I learn that William’s son

invented cyanotypes! When I started combining

these two methods, I had no idea I would be

connecting a nineteenth-century father and son

in my work.” [For more on cyanotypes by Anna

Atkins, see p. 82].

Gulacsy’s connection to science did not begin

with the Herschels. It started with her interest

in physics. “I recently came across The Best

Trick of Light by David Elbaz; he explains how,

since the beginning of the universe, matter

organises thanks to light. In order for particles

to agglomerate, light particles are emitted. So,

the more complex an object is, the more light

gets produced. This reality can be observed in

stars, galaxies and nebulas,” says Gulacsy, “but

it is even more exciting to consider that the

human body – and life in general – is the most

complex object the universe has created. We

humans emit 200,000 times more photons than

the Sun, in scale and in the infrared spectrum.

If we were to take that further, if one centimetre

square of a human is 200,000 times brighter

than one centimetre square of a star – then we

are stars too! This idea took my breath away, as

a person and an artist, and I felt I needed to see

this light ‘in the living’.

Prior to studying bees, I was studying stars,

their distances and their relationship between

time and space. It’s funny how that ultimately

led me to look at something within arm’s reach,

found in any blooming garden. I put on my

beekeepers suit and feel like an astronaut! What

I am observing now in the garden, still looks like

the sky; the parallel is very interesting. I want

my art to be about exploration: for the viewer

to think they are seeing something, and then

discover they are actually seeing something

else. That is how art becomes memorable, when

it sparks a realisation, just like science does.”

LINDA FALCONE


Blue Prints

Anna Atkins’ cyanotype impressions

In 1842, scientist John Herschel coined the

term ‘cyanotype’ to describe his camera-less

printmaking technique. While searching for

a quick and easy method to make copies of his

notes and diagrams, he discovered that by laying

an object on paper coated with a solution of iron

salts, exposing it to UV light, and then washing it

with water, he could create stunning white and

Prussian blue images. When Herschel shared his

invention with friends in the Royal Society, Britain’s

foremost scientific body, John George Children, a

former director of the British Museum’s natural

history collection, and his daughter, Anna Atkins,

were among the first to learn of the process.

As a skilled botanical illustrator, Anna was

part of a largely invisible community of women

whose significant contributions to scientific

advancement have gone mostly unnoticed. It was

common for women, often the wives or daughters

of male scientists, to produce the illustrations in

scientific texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. This was, in fact, a centuries’ old

tradition. Baroque painter Giovanna Garzoni

(1600-1670) was renowned for her still lifes, which

rendered every feature of her floral subjects

in exquisite detail. She started her career in

Florence, where she had access to the most upto-date

microscopic lenses, perfected by Galileo

Galilei, through which to observe her specimens.

Some of Garzoni’s botanic illustrations were

created specifically for use by natural historians

who prized their accuracy in identifying and

differentiating similar species of plants. In the

century that followed, collage artist Mary Delany

(1700-1788) leaned into the innovative Linnaean

system of classifying flora and fauna, using it to

identify her 985 individual flower portraits (see

Issue 6). She produced each one by combining

scores of carefully cut paper shapes and mounting

them onto black backgrounds. Though simple, her

technique was refined enough to create images

that were not only beautiful but recognised by

botanists as being faithful in every detail to their

natural models.

Anna’s drawing skills had first been put to use

to illustrate her father’s translation of French

naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of

Shells. The study of shells was then popular as

part of early attempts to formulate a theory of

evolution to explain the slow but constant change

of nature over time. An engraver transformed

Anna’s drawings into etched plates for printing,

which were published in three issues of The

Quarterly Journal of Science in 1823. Originally

attributed to “A.C.”, when the articles were later

printed and bound as a single volume, Children

ensured that “Miss Anna Children” was credited

in large type on the title page.

Right: Anna Atkins, Carix (America), c. 1848-1853, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York

Mary Cochrane, 2025, finished flower in porcelain


Left: Anna Atkins, Ferns Specimen, 1840s, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Google Art Project

Center: Anna Atkins, Halydrys siliquosa, c. 1853, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons

Above: Presumed self-portrait of Anna Children (Atkins), c. 1820, from original drawing in the Nurstead Court Archives

Following her marriage to John Pelly Atkins in

1825, Anna’s continuing interest in science was

channelled into botany. She amassed a large

collection of pressed plants from specimens

growing in the grounds of her home and in the

woods of surrounding counties. In 1839, she

joined the Botanical Society of London, one of

the only scientific societies to admit female

members, and became part of a network of other

plant-loving friends who would help add to her

collection. Around this time, father and daughter

followed with interest experiments which would

lead to the development of photography. When

Herschel shared the details of his new technique,

Anna recognised its potential to create images

of her collection of algae, whose details she had

struggled to capture in her drawings. To one of

her botanical friends, she wrote, “The difficulty of

making accurate drawings of objects as minute

as many of the Algae … has induced me to avail

myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process

of Cyanotype.”

After experimenting with the process, Anna

set about making images of her collection with

a view to creating a guide to the seaweed of

Britain. In 1843, she completed the first volume

of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype

Impressions, now regarded as the world’s first

photographically illustrated book. Two further

volumes followed. To create the approximately

fourteen copies of British Algae, Atkins printed

some six thousand cyanotype photogram

exposures on hand-treated paper, doing the bulk

of the work herself. Each booklet was delicately

hand-stitched together, bound in bright blue

covers. Anna ensured that her achievement

came to the attention of prominent scientists of

the day; she sent the first copy of each volume

to the Royal Society, the second to Herschel, and

the third to W.H.F. Talbot, another pioneer in the

field of photography. The recipients would have

known that the initials ‘A.A.’, with which Anna

signed the introduction, stood for Anna Atkins.

But, just 50 years later, when Scottish chemist

and book collector William Lang, acquired a copy,

he was unable to find any clues to the author’s

identity. Knowing only that the photographs had

been made by a woman, he concluded that the

initials stood for ‘Anonymous Amateur’.

In the years following Atkins’ groundbreaking

use of cyanotypes to create her botanical albums,

the process was largely ignored by artists as

silver-based photography became the dominant

medium. Cyanotype was used principally to

reproduce technical drawings, or blueprints, in

the fields of architecture and engineering. Today,

we appreciate the inherent beauty of cyanotypes

and are drawn to these striking images almost

instinctively. Contemporary artists are no less

interested than Anna Atkins was in the natural

world and in the scientific breakthroughs that

have allowed us to study it more closely, as the

work of the two Garden Project artists (see p. 74)

demonstrates. Silvia Infranco looks at centuries’

old medicinal recipes derived from plants and

the role of women in preserving the memory of

traditional remedies. Cyrielle Gulascy’s fascination

with the light emitted by cosmic bodies led her

back to William Herschel, who discovered infrared,

and his son, John, who demonstrated how UV

light can be used to produce otherworldly blue

and white images. Like Anna Atkins, she will avail

herself of this beautiful process to represent

natural phenomena in a way they have not been

seen before.

MARGIE MACKINNON


Scattered Tuscan Songs

The Life and Art of Francesca Alexander

An interview with author

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

FFrancesca Alexander and her parents were an

important part of Boston’s artistic, intellectual,

and abolitionist communities in the early

nineteenth century. But they left their home for

Florence in 1853, when Francesca was sixteen,

joining the many Anglo-Americans who found

life there both rewarding and affordable in

the years preceding Italy’s unification. While

there, Francesca’s painter father, Francis,

found opportunities to copy and train, and

collected and sold the work of Old Masters

and his contemporaries purchased paintings

to keep, or to sell overseas; the Americans’

growing appetite for art could not be met by

the nineteenth-century US art market, where

originals were still scarce.

Like her painter father, Francesca became

a highly esteemed, though largely untrained,

artist, with an eye for both nature and portraits.

She used her Italian friends as models in

representations of saints like Magdalene

and Agnes, and Old Testament heroines like

Ruth. In exchange, they taught her stories

and songs that she eventually published with

the assistance of the English aesthete and

author John Ruskin, who amplified her fame.

At a presentation at Cultural Association Il

Palmerino and in her recent book The Life

and Art of Francesca Alexander, Musacchio

chronicles this former celebrity who has all

but ‘disappeared from history’.

Restoration Conversations: You describe

Francesca Alexander as an ‘artist and

philanthropist’. How did these two sides of her

persona shape her legacy?

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio: Francesca

focused a lot of her efforts on providing her

Italian friends with charity, using the money

she made selling her art and her books, as well

as donations from friends and patrons, who

sometimes paid her more than she requested,

with the understanding that the rest would fund

her charitable activities. On other occasions,

they made outright donations to Francesca’s

efforts, and she sometimes thanked them with

specially made manuscripts. She gifted an

Above: Francesca Alexander, Charity, 1861. Location unknown


illustrated manuscript to prominent Bostonian

Sarah Shaw Russell, in 1862, after receiving a

silk bag filled with coins called francesconi –

the equivalent of about 50 American dollars

and a very large sum at the time – to distribute

to the poor. This tiny manuscript described

the individuals and families whose lives were

being improved by this donation, with detailed

sketches of flowers, people and the Tuscan

countryside, balancing Francesca’s incredible

calligraphic script. It marked a pivotal moment

in Francesca’s career. Sarah Shaw Russell, back

in Boston, showed it to her friends, which

generated additional donations, obligating

Francesca to create more manuscripts,

although this is the only one I’ve located so

far. In 1863, Francesca’s mother Lucia described

the Shaw manuscript to John Lowell Gardner

and his wife Catherine Endicott Peabody, and

expressed the hope that they would see it

too. The Gardners obviously did, and then

commissioned Francesca for what would

become her largest, most complex painting.

RC: You’re referring to an oil-on-canvas work

called Decorating a Shrine, that Francesca

produced in 1865. Can you tell us more about it?

JMM: The painting portrays a group of three

Italian girls leaving flowers at a roadside shrine

dedicated to the Madonna, with a view of the

hills surrounding Florence in the background.

In a letter to the Gardners, Lucia claimed

that Francesca painted “A literal copy of the

view, which you will remember, and there are

flowers enough to suit you.” Apparently, the

shrine no longer survives, but Francesca was a

very literal artist, so I don’t think she made it up

entirely. The overt Catholic iconography in this

painting intended for American Protestants

was mitigated by a reference to Dante’s Divine

Comedy, in the inscription below the Madonna

at the base of the shrine. This would have been

a reference that sophisticated Bostonians,

like the Gardners, and their Dante-loving

daughter-in-law Isabella Stewart Gardner

– who inherited the painting and placed it

in her Boston Museum – would have really

appreciated.

RC: Let’s talk about Francesca’s largest and

most elaborate manuscript, which she called

Tuscan Songs. We know she learned many

of the songs she transcribed and translated

for this manuscript from her friend, the

improvisational singer Marie Beatrice Bugelli

Bernardi, better known as Beatrice di Pian degli

Ontani. Others she heard on the streets and

among field labourers, around Florence or in

the Apennine where her family spent their

summers.

JMM: Originally, this manuscript had 122 folios

crowded with bilingual text, music, figural

scenes, and illustrations of flowers, vines

and grasses. Francesca used her botanical

knowledge to draw Tuscan plants on each

folio, allegedly in order of their blooming

season. Because of the great effort this

required over several years, her father set the

price at a rather daunting 600 pounds, before

she even finished it. Then, in October 1882,

through a mutual friend, the American painter

Henry Roderick Newman, Francesca and her

mother Lucia met John Ruskin, on what would

be Ruskin’s final visit to Florence. Francesca’s

love of nature and her portrayal of Italian

life accorded well with his interests. Ruskin

immediately purchased the manuscript for

his Saint George’s Museum, which he founded

in Sheffield, England, to promote art for the

benefit of local labourers.

He explained his motivation to Lucia in a letter,

writing, ‘One of my chief objects in obtaining

the manuscript will be conveying to the mind of

our English peasantry, not to say princes, some

sympathetic conception of the reality of the

sweet soul of Catholic Italy’. This was of course,

Above:

Left: Francesca Alexander, 1865, Decorating a Shrine. , Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum


very patronizing, but Ruskin was particularly

appreciative of Francesca’s use of her Italian

friends as her models to express these ideas.

According to Ruskin, “English Pre-Raphaelites

never had the boldness to conceive Christ or

His mother as they would have looked, with

English faces, camping on Hampstead Heath,

[they] never brought the vision of them close,

home to the living English heart.” Yet, Francesca,

he insisted, represented every [scene] as it would

have happened in Tuscany.

RC: As you discuss in your book, although

they only met in person a few times, Ruskin

and Francesca developed a close personal

relationship through their correspondence;

they referred to each other as ‘brother’ and

‘sister’, using the Italian terms fratello and

sorella. He published three of her manuscripts

– editing them significantly, keeping many

of the profits for himself, and praised her

in his lectures and publications. He often

referred to Francesca as a girl, implying that

her youth made her achievements all the

more remarkable. But when they met, she was

already 45 years old.

JMM: Ruskin recognised the commercial

potential of Francesca’s work, and of Francesca

herself, and his almost predatory enthusiasm

for both, sustained him the last years of his

life. He published her first book, about her

seamstress friend Ida, whom he believed

personified ideal feminine virtue, in 1883; its

first page identified ‘Francesca’, with no last

name, as author and Ruskin as editor, and it

was met with great acclaim. Then he turned to

the song manuscript; he reordered some of her

folios, removed others, integrated biographies

she wrote about her models as well as excerpts

from her letters, inserted his own preface and

explanatory essays, and cut the illustrations

from 122 to 20. This fundamentally changed

the manuscript, shifting its focus to text, much

of it written or at least edited by Ruskin, instead

of Francesca’s drawings and the bilingual

verses and music. Beginning in April 1884, he

published the first of ten installments, of what

he now called Roadside Songs of Tuscany,

rather than her Tuscan Songs, followed by a

complete volume in September 1885. This too

was widely praised, and further secured her

fame.

Though never contested by Francesca,

Ruskin’s treatment of that manuscript was

a huge disappointment to Lucia. Later, with

the help of Ruskin’s family and colleagues,

Lucia located most of the 122 folios

scattered throughout the UK, and had them

photographed for a book with Francesca’s

original title, published in 1897. This was a

very expensive endeavour, but Lucia wanted

her daughter’s efforts to be preserved.

RC: Why has Francesca been largely forgotten

by history?

JMM: During her lifetime, Francesca was a

sight to be seen, like Florence’s churches,

palaces and works of art. Travellers gathered

to watch Francesca draw in her studio on the

rooftop of the Hotel Bonciani in piazza Santa

Maria Novella. If they were fortunate, they left

with a work of art, or some of the flowers she

cultivated there. The Alexanders were well

connected and they socialized with the family

of American sculptor Hiram Powers, Elisabeth

and Robert Browning, Princess Luisa Murat,

and novelist Isa Blagden, to name only a few

of the prominent Anglo-American residents of

Florence, as well as many Italians across the

economic and social spectrum.

Above, left: Francesca Alexander, before 1883. Folio from Tuscan Songs. Wellesley College Special Collections.

Right: Francesca Alexander, 1861. Folio 45 from History of Fifty Francesconi Given to the Poor. Boston Athenaeum

Why has she been forgotten? Perhaps it is

because she outlived her time. Remember, she

came to Italy in 1853, and she died in 1917. So

much happened in Italy – and beyond! – during

that time. But Francesca never changed her

style to adapt to modernism; I don’t think she

was even aware of it. And unlike many Anglo-

Americans, Francesca sort of disappeared into

Italy, and never moved back to her native

land. We know about her life because of a

wealth of surviving correspondence and other

contemporary documentation, as well as a

group of massive scrapbooks Lucia assembled

to document her daughter’s life, with her

drawings, prints, invitations to parties, calling

cards, letters documenting her connections

to prominent Anglo-Americans and Italians,

and more. Francesca’s art is scattered in both

public and private collections, and I am also

certain – absolutely certain – that even more

is in private collections in Florence today, and

I hope, as more people learn about Francesca,

that these objects will come to light.

LINDA FALCONE

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio is Professor of

Art at Wellesley College in the United States. A

specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque

art, and Americans in nineteenth-century Italy,

her previous publications include the books

The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance

Italy (1999) and Art, Marriage, and Family in

the Florentine Renaissance Palace (2008)

as well as articles and essays on the Anglo-

American population of Italy. Her book, The Art

and Life of Francesca Alexander 1837-1917, was

published in 2025.


A Chance Encounter

with Juana Romani

Sweet dreams and tragic heroines

My partner Stefano and I happened upon

painter Juana Romani unexpectedly. We

were traveling from Paris to the Normandy

coast, after Covid-related travel restrictions

had been lifted, eager for cultural discoveries

and museum visits. On the outskirts of Paris, in

Courbevoie, we found the Roybet-Fould Museum,

housed in an elegant and eccentric pavilion built

for Norway and Sweden at the 1878 World’s Fair.

They were holding an exhibition dedicated to an

Italian-French painter that piqued our interest:

Juana Romani, Model and Painter. An Absolute

Dream. Discovering her was rather dreamlike, in

fact, and her story has stayed with me since.

Juana Romani, born Giovanna Carolina

Carlesimo in 1867, in the town of Velletri, in Italy’s

Lazio region, emigrated to Paris with her mother

Marianna and her mother’s partner, Temistocle

Romani, at the age of ten. In some ways, her

story reflects that of many female painters of

her time, who made their debut in the artworld

as models and muses. Yet, Romani’s paintings

and her personality are unique, and they stay

with you, like a spell.

The exhibition unfolded in wood-panelled

rooms, akin to a giant dollhouse. Our footsteps

creaked on the wood floors, as we made our way

through, stopping in front of her large canvases

depicting mostly self-portraits of the artist as a

heroine or historical figure, and other female

models – often foreigners like she was – wrapped

in lavish fabrics, sublimated by light and vivid hues.

On canvas, she captured figures who became

myths and women immortalised by history and

literature, but her characters’ expressions exude

a profound sense of unease and the need for

recognition, a defining characteristic of the

painter herself.

The exhibition’s first rooms recounted her early

period: Carolina, still a teenager, began her career

as a model at the Colarossi art school (where her

mother had posed) before moving on to studios

of fin de siècle Paris, such as those of sculptor

Alexandre Falguière, or painters Jean-Jacques

Henner, Carolus-Duran, Victor Prouvé, Jean-André

Rixens, Victor Peter and Ferdinand Roybet.

She grew up in the eyes of the men who

portrayed her, feeding off their gazes. Courageous

Right: Juana Romani, La fille de Théodora, 1892–1893. Private collection. Source: Wikipedia


and eager for knowledge, she devoured the books

left sitting on tables in the art studios where she

modelled, studying the subjects who would later

become her heroines – biblical or mythological

figures, often classical and Italian. She observed

the lines and gestures of preparatory drawing

and learned the intricacies of colour composition,

from pigment preparation to mixing on the

palette. She sensed the light encompassing her in

her nakedness, instinctively understanding tonal

changes and the rendering of shadows.

She received a unique education that found

fertile ground in her innate intelligence; it was

rooted in the cultural contacts she made, but

also fostered in late childhood, through her

stepfather’s mentorship, which led her to read

and write in Italian and French at a young age.

Her thirst for independence pushed her to

experiment on the opposite side of the canvas – a

bold move for the time – supported first by genre

painter Jean-Jacques Henner, and then by her

teacher and lover Ferdinand Roybet, a historical

and costume painter, who guided and encouraged

her throughout her life.

At seventeen, she changed her name, a decisive

step in asserting her identity: Giovanna Carolina

became Juana, perhaps inspired by a heroine in

her books, and, in a nod to her Italian roots, she

kept the surname of her stepfather Romani, a

cornerstone in her life.

Romani’s fame grew with the advent of

international exhibitions. In 1889, she represented

Italy at the World’s Fair, receiving important

recognition; the following year, she exhibited at

the Paris Salon. Until 1903, she was often present

as both a sitter and as a portraitist which further

boosted her fame, causing her to be considered

the artist of the moment. Along with her renown

came the pressure to live up to expectations and

to bear the weight of criticism in a period that saw

great changes in painterly styles and public tastes.

It may have been this pressure that triggered her

Above: Juana Romani, Young Man with Earrings, c. 1890–1892, inventory number 2020.3, The Roybet Fould Museum

Above left: Juana Romani, Hérodiade, 1890, FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum) / The Levett Collection, ph. Jérôme Kelagopian

Right: Juana Romani, Portrait of a Redhead Woman Seen in Profile, FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum) / The Levett Collection

first signs of mental fragility, which would worsen

in the years that followed, with frequent crises and

hospitalisations, until her tragic death in 1923, in a

care home in Château de Suresnes, at only fiftysix

years old, alone and destitute.

One work in the Roybet-Fould exhibition struck

us in particular: La fille de Théodore, painted

in 1892. Imbued with orientalism, the painting

conveys a dichotomy between attraction and

suspense, as you might feel before a snake staring

into your eyes. Its very young model is already

aware of her seductive power, which the artist

emphasises in the tilt of her head, silhouetted

against the brocade background. Behind a

childlike fringe there is a glint in her eyes. The

two brooches that hold her rich cloak in place

seem to almost pierce her pale flesh, and contrast

with the heavy fabrics draped over her, more to

cover than to dress.

A few years earlier, in Hérodiade (1890), Juana

had portrayed herself as a biblical villain. Here, we

see her defiant and complacent gaze, heightened


In 1889, she represented Italy at the World’s Fair,

receiving important recognition; the following year,

she exhibited at the Paris Salon. Until 1903, she was

often present as both a sitter and as a portraitist

which further boosted her fame, causing her to be

considered the artist of the moment.

Federica Paretti

by the position of her arm on her hip. The shadows

of her hair on her face increase the impact of her

eyes, which seem to break through the darkness

and reach outwards with greater force, like a ray of

sunlight shining through the clouds. The painting

is hosted in Mougins at FAMM, the women’s art

museum founded by Christian Levett, whose

collection boasts two other portraits by the artist.

After our first encounter with Juana Romani,

Stefano and I discovered that she has been

increasingly studied in Italy in recent years,

finally emerging from obscurity, and revealing

herself to the international art public in numerous

publications. This winter, to further connect with

Romani, we travelled to Velletri, her hometown.

Leaving Rome along the Appia Antica, the

landscape opens up into a timeless dimension.

Crossing the Castelli Romani, lakes and woods

alternate with ruins and pleasant villages, but

also with ungainly buildings and abandoned

warehouses. Velletri stands on a hill overlooking

the Agro Pontino plain. The town’s highest square

is marked by three imposing works of architecture

– the Town Hall, the Prison, the Archdiocese. They

seemed to stand in defiance of one another,

reminding us of the dominance of their three

powers – the political class, the judiciary and the

clergy – which governed the city over the course

of centuries. We wondered where to look to find

traces of the painter. We headed to the large

municipal building that houses the Oreste Nardini

Civic Archaeological Museum, where two young

women at the front office allowed us to consult

and photograph a rare copy of a publication

on Juana, never intended for sale. It is the

commemorative catalogue of the last exhibition

dedicated to her, in 2017, at the town’s Convento

del Carmine.

We are disappointed when they tell us there are

no works by Romani on display in Velletri. During

her trip home in 1901, after participating in the

Venice Exhibition, Juana promised the mayor she

would donate her entire collection to the city to

create a civic museum. After her death, however,

her works were sold at auction in France and

dispersed. What we did find was that a significant

financial donation she made contributed to the

opening of a local art school named after her, and

to the establishment of an award for deserving

young students. They are still in existence today.

The idea of finding the Romani family home

was appealing to us, and that’s where we headed

next. I imagine the little family stayed at the vast

Palazzo Romani Adami, for a short time before their

departure abroad. Juana’s mother, Annamaria – or

Marianna – had arrived in the town, after her ‘pastlife’

as a peasant in the marshy and insalubrious

flatlands of the Agro plain, where large swathes

of land were owned by the Romani family, one of

the area’s most influential landowning clans. With

her child in tow, she had fled from her husband,

Giacinto Carlesimo, who was wanted by the police

and on the run for banditry. That is how Marianna

ended up in service at the Romani family palace.

Right: Ferdinand Roybet, Portrait of Juana Romani, 1894, inv. 2002.3.1. © Courbevoie, Roybet Fould Museum, Franck Boucourt


Front cover:

Jinx Staring at Statue, Florence Italy, 1951. Courtesy © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Contents page:

Installation view, ‘Relative Ties’ curated by Harriet Loffler, featuring works by EQ Nicholson,

ph. Jo Underhill Still from The Long Road to the Directors’ Chair by Vibeke Løkkeber

Juana Romani, Théodora, 1892, Moderne Kunst : Illustriete Zeitschrift 9.1895. Source: Wikipedia

ilvia Infranco, Contro mal di testa da malinconia (For Headaches Caused by Melancholy), 2023

Inside back cover:

Nancy Nicholson (the younger) at work on the Devaris Panel, ph. Emma Lee

Back cover:

Nancy Nicholson with Smuts, c. 1917, in her Land Army uniform © Estate of Nancy Nicholson

Above: Ferdinand Roybet, Portrait of Juana Romani, 1891, formerly at the Roybet Fould Museum, Courbevoie, inv. 219.

Stolen in 1981. © Courbevoie, Roybet Fould Museum, ph. Giraudon

No doubt tensions were high when the dynasty’s

sensitive seventh son fell in love with the comely,

spirited Marianna, who wanted a different fate

for herself and her daughter. The union was

met with moral disapproval and concerns over

inheritance. In a province where everyone was

raised to observe and to judge, that intertwining

of different social classes was difficult to sustain.

Hence, the three left for France.

I like to imagine that this departure was not

only driven by necessity. Perhaps it was also

fuelled by little Juana’s desire to make her mark in

life. In my mind’s eye, I see her playing under the

large centuries-old oak tree in the garden of the

imposing palace, or in Piazza San Martino, gazing

towards the plain below – the harsh land of her

peasant childhood. She may have come to see her

rough native land as the source of her strength,

rather than a collection of memories to be hidden

or forgotten. I imagine Juana with her eyes closed,

dreaming of carving her name in the annals of

history, of having her tenacious story come to

light, alongside others of her native land, so often

told from the male perspective. From farmland, to

palazzo to painting studio, this heroine has her

own story to tell.

FEDERICA PARRETTI



Restoration Conversations magazine – Spring 2026

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Restoration Conversations magazine – Spring 2026

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