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Harley Granville-Barker

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Category

Photographs

Date

1901

Materials

Paper

Measurements

9 x 6 ins

Order this image

Collection

Shaw's Corner, Hertfordshire

NT 1274650

Summary

Photograph of Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), taken by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in 1901. A half-length portrait with arms folded, facing the camera. Barker wears a dark jacket, shirt with wing collar, and bow tie. Glazed; black passe partout frame.

Full description

Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) was an actor, playwright, theatre director, and Shakespearean scholar, who was for many years among Shaw’s closest friends. Shaw and Granville-Barker transformed the British theatre with their radical productions of modern plays during the period they worked together at the Royal Court Theatre in London (1904-1907). The Court Theatre specialised in a repertoire of socially relevant plays, written in a realistic style. Experimental or controversial works by Shaw and Ibsen were introduced to new audiences. This “New Drama” encouraged people to engage with intellectual ideas and social issues, rather than merely offering the melodramas characteristic of Victorian theatre. Barker was fundamental to Shaw’s success as a playwright, producing eleven Shaw plays during his time at the Court Theatre. As an actor, he starred in several important productions taking leading roles in Shaw’s plays such as Man and Superman, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Candida. In later life Barker became a respected critic of Shakespeare’s plays, and was regarded as an authority. Towards the end of his life Shaw recalled how he and Barker had first met in 1900: “In looking about for an actor suitable for the part of the poet in Candida at a Stage Society performance, I had found my man in a very remarkable person named Harley Granville Barker. He was at that time 23 years of age, and had been on the stage since he was 14. He had a strong strain of Italian blood in him, and looked as if he had stepped out of a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli [Italian Renaissance painter]. He had a wide literary culture and a fastidiously delicate taste in every branch of art…He was self-willed, restlessly industrious, sober and quite sane. He had Shakespear[sic] and Dickens at his finger ends. Altogether the most distinguished and incomparably the most cultivated person whom circumstances had driven into the theatre at that time…His performance of this part [Eugene Marchbanks in Candida] – a very difficult one to cast – was, humanly speaking, perfect.” (Bernard Shaw, “Granville-Barker: Some Particulars”, Drama, Winter 1946, No.3, pp.7-14). Shaw took the photograph of Barker in 1901 at Piccard’s Cottage, one of the country houses in Surrey rented by the Shaws shortly after their marriage. Many years later Shaw displayed the photograph prominently in the dining room on the mantelpiece, where it formed part of the arrangement of images of male figures assembled by Shaw during the 1940s. A label verso bears the inscription: “Granville-Barker at Pickard’s Cottage, 1900. Died in Paris 1946.” Shaw took numerous photographs of Barker, including some in the garden at Shaw’s Corner with his first wife the actress Lillah McCarthy, who starred alongside Barker in Man and Superman, and The Doctor’s Dilemma. The pair married in 1906, and were the first guests to stay at Shaw’s Corner in November that year. Barker similarly photographed Shaw, even taking nude snapshots whilst on the beach sunbathing at Mevagissey, Cornwall during a summer holiday. A further infamous photograph by Barker can be seen in Shaw’s study, where Shaw is pictured alongside dramatist J.M. Barrie, drama critic William Archer, author G.K. Chesterton, and art patron Howard de Walden, posed as cowboys during the making of a film in 1914. Barker’s marriage to Lillah came to an end in 1915 when he fell in love with a wealthy American, Helen Huntington, whom he married in 1918. Huntington disapproved of Shaw because he had taken Lillah’s side in the divorce, resulting in an irreparable rift between the two men. Shaw was devastated. Barker eventually abandoned the theatre and moved to Paris, dying there in 1946. A number of copies of Barker’s plays and other writings survive in the Shaws’ library, many of them gifts from Barker to Charlotte Shaw, reflecting their close friendship. These include his plays Waste, The Voysey Inheritance, and Prunella. The Shaws owned an important drawing of Barker by the artist John Singer Sargent, which Shaw presented to the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1944. This photograph on the mantelpiece was chosen by Shaw to illustrate his article on Barker published in Drama magazine in 1946 as a touching eulogy when his one-time creative partner died. (Bernard Shaw, “Granville-Barker: Some Particulars”, Drama, Winter 1946, No.3, pp.7-14, photograph published as a full page image on page 9). An additional tribute appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, where Shaw wrote: ‘We clicked so well together that I regarded him as my contemporary until one day at rehearsal, when someone remarked that I was fifty, he said, “You are the same age as my father.” After that it seemed impossible that he should die before me. The shock the news gave me made me realize how I had still cherished a hope that our old intimate relationship might revive.’ (TLS, 7 September 1946).(Alice McEwan 2020)

Provenance

The Shaw Collection. The house and contents were bequeathed to the National Trust by George Bernard Shaw in 1950, together with Shaw's photographic archive.

Marks and inscriptions

Label on back handwritten (by Shaw?) "GRANVILLE-BARKER AT PICKARD'S COTTAGE 1900(?). DIED IN PARIS 1946"

Makers and roles

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), photographer

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