Nancy Cunard in the Studio

by DR. TRACY BONFITTO, CURATOR OF ART

In the Studio

Is it March, spring, winter, autumn, twilight, noon
Told in this distant sound of cuckoo clocks?
Sunday it is—five lilies in swoon
Decay against your wall, aggressive flocks
Of alley-starlings aggravate a mood.
The rain drops pensively. ‘If one could paint,
Combine the abstract with a certain rude
Individual form, knot passion with restraint…
If one could use the murk that fills a brain,
Undo old symbols and beget again
Fresh meaning on dead emblem…’ so one lies
Here timeless, while the lilies’ withering skin
Attests the hours, and rain sweeps from the skies,
The bird sits on the chimney, looking in.

—Nancy Cunard, 1923

Writer, publisher, heiress, and activist Nancy Cunard composed “In the Studio” while sitting for a portrait in Eugene McCown’s Paris studio on the Rue Campagne Première. Both writer and artist were part of an influential circle of avant-garde cultural figures in Jazz-Age Paris that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, and Jean Cocteau. McCown had arrived around 1921 from his native Missouri by way of New York, and Cunard had relocated from London shortly before. Soon after the two met at Le Boef sur le Toit, a famed Parisian restaurant and cabernet, she became his close friend and benefactor.¹ Fueled by Cunard’s sizable fortune and taking advantage of recent improvements to the European railway network, the two traveled widely in addition to spending much time together in Paris.

In her poem, the speaker takes the perspectives of both sitter and artist, and reflects on momentary irritations—the thought-piercing sounds of bird calls—as well as the pursuit of enduring art. The unpublished typescript poem, with its hand-annotations by the author, is today part of the Ransom Center’s Nancy Cunard Collection. Also part of the Center’s collection is the oil-on-board portrait painted during that studio session.

In the portrait, Cunard is seated, poised with a walking stick in her right hand and wearing one of her signature bangles on her left wrist. Her cropped hair is tucked under a top hat so tall that it extends beyond the frame of the picture. She wears a man’s riding habit—her father’s—and a patterned ascot, knotted around her elongated neck and tucked beneath a high stand collar. The angular verticality of the painting is enhanced by Cunard’s upturned gaze. Her facial expression—calm, but haltingly intense—resembles that in many contemporaneous photographs of her. The placement of the clouds against the variable but inky dark background makes the setting seem inscrutable, timeless, and impossible to place physically.

Cunard displayed the portrait in her Paris home until 1927, when she moved to a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Réanville, Normandy. By 1928 she had established Hours Press in support of experimental poetry, and the portrait remained in Normandy until Germany’s occupation of France during World War II. When she was finally able to return to her home after the war, Cunard noted that much of her artwork, letters, books, and bangles had been lost. She found the portrait in the mud on the farmhouse grounds. The board was structurally warped and pierced through. She speculated to friends that the one-inch hole had been made by a Nazi bayonet.

Cunard recounted this story to Thérèse Ford, her long-time friend and the former wife of Hugh Ford, who edited several of Cunard’s books. Cunard eventually gifted the painting to Thérèse, and the Ransom Center acquired it in 1991.

McCown’s painting of Nancy Cunard is one of three portraits of creative women that were recently conserved, thanks to generous donors to the Ransom Center’s 2024 fundraising campaign in support of collections care. Together with Pavel Tchelitchew’s ca. 1930 portrait of Edith Sitwell and Emanual Glicen Romano’s ca. 1949 portrait of Carson McCullers, the portrait of Cunard has been treated, repaired, and reframed.

Conservators carefully cleaned the painting before consolidating areas of paint loss and vulnerability, and repaired the one-inch puncture that was located to the left of the sitter’s head. The painting was then secured to a secondary support, ensuring it can be safely mounted for display. Ransom Center exhibitions and curatorial staff designed a custom frame, one that enhances the presentation of the work and stylistically remains in line with the time period of its creation, to protect and highlight it for exhibition.

From February 24 until mid-July 2025, visitors to the Ransom Center can view the newly conserved portrait of Cunard displayed in our main lobby. Visitors are also invited to explore our extensive Cunard-related holdings of art, archival materials, photographs, and books online and onsite in our Reading Room.

¹ Cunard recounts this meeting and her early impressions of McCown in her posthumously published These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Hugh Ford, ed., Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.