Images of TS Eliot

The National Portrait Gallery provides more than 60 images of TS Eliot, including paintings, busts and photographs.

Getty Images hold more than 70 images under TS Eliot, including both the Hulton Archive and LIFE collections of photos.

The Faber archive contains photographs of Eliot during his literary life, together with images of his published works, his letters, drawings and reader reports, and the office in which he worked.

Photographs

(in approximate chronological order)

A six-year-old Eliot, reading on the porch of his childhood summer home

TS Eliot in the 1910 Class Album, Harvard

TS Eliot and his mother, c.1918

TS Eliot’s freshman group photograph, Merton College, Oxford

 TS Eliot photographed by Virginia Woolf, in one of her Monks House albums

TS Eliot with EM Forster, probably at Virginia Woolf’s house c.1922

TS Eliot & WB Yeats, at a luncheon given by Kenneth Ballard Murdock in c. 1925.

TS Eliot & Virginia Woolf, circa 1932

TS Eliot by Man Ray, 1935

TS Eliot by George Platt Lynes, 1947

TS Eliot having just received the Nobel Prize, in 1948 (alongside Swiss Scientist Paul Mueller who won that year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine)

TS Eliot by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE magazine, 1951 – and a version hanging in the Athenaeum

TS Eliot by Irving Penn, 1950 and 1960

TS Eliot by Cecil Beaton, 1956

TS Eliot by John Loengard, 1956

TS Eliot’s signed passport photograph, 1956

TS and Valerie Eliot by Richard Avedon, 1958

TS Eliot by Horst Tappe, 1964

TS Eliot in Russell Square Underground station, photo from the journals of George Seferis; a dedication on the back reads: “Inscribed to George Seferis by a brother poet.”

TS & Valerie Eliot, at home

TS Eliot on the beach, trousers rolled…

Before performance of The Elder Statesman, TS Eliot in London’s West End (with cat!)

 

Portraits

TS Eliot by William Rothenstein, 1933 pencil portrait

TS Eliot by Wyndham Lewis, 1930s, pen, ink, coloured pencil and washes

In a brief newsreel clip from 1938, Wyndham Lewis discusses the rejection by the Royal Academy of his famous portrait of TS Eliot

The rarely-seen working studies by Patrick Heron, in preparation for his portrait of Eliot

Two portraits of TS Eliot included in the sale of Valerie Eliot’s art collection; a 1946 watercolour by RH Wilenski – and a charcoal portrait by Bernard Fuchs.

A portrait of TS Eliot by Ronald Searle, produced for a series Heroes of Our Time, published in Punch in the late 1950s. Details and a preliminary sketch are here.

TS Eliot by Sir Gerald Festus Kelly, 1962 portrait, and 1961 predecessor

Pen and ink portrait of TS Eliot by Leib Chigrin, 2016

 

Illustrations & Caricatures

Caricature of TS Eliot by Ted Scheel, published at the time of The Cocktail Party

TS Eliot on the cover of Time magazine, 1950

TS Eliot, younger, older, and again, by US literary illustrator David Levine

TS Eliot by US illustrator Bernie Fuchs

TS Eliot by US caricaturist and muralist Edward Sorel

TS Eliot by Ralph Steadman, a poster for an Eliot commemorative event in 1988

 

Other

TS Eliot on a US postage stamp

TS Eliot on the cover of the Saturday Review, 13th Sept 1958

Rare film footage of TS Eliot at the opening of the Sheffield University Library, 1959

A remarkable film captures TS Eliot and other members of the initial production of Murder in the Cathedral a week after the play’s first performance on the 15th June 1935,

 

 

 

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