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Agatha Thornycroft

Frederick Hollyer

Platinum Print

4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

Mounted on a gray card with the photographer's name and address: "Fredr Hollyer, 9 Pembroke Sqre, Kensington W" and numbered 3066 on verso

This image from the Roy Davids collection of portraits and information about it has been reproduced here thanks to Mr. Davids and to George Plumptre of Bonham's 1873 Ltd. Copyright, of course, remains with them

According to the Bonham's catalogue, Agatha Thornycroft, the wife of the famous sculptor, Sir W. Hamo Thornycroft, and aunt of the poet Siegfried Sasoon, "was imagined by Hardy for the central character of his most famous novel . . . . Thomas Hardy met Mrs. Hamo Thornycroft at Edmund Gosse's house on July 23 1889, thought her 'the most beautiful woman in England,' and wrote in his diary 'of the people I have met this summer, the Lady whose mouth recalls more fully than any other beauty's the Elizabethan metaphor 'her lips are roses full of snow' is Mrs H.T.'s, terms precisely echoing those used of Tess's mouth in the novel. Hardy himself told Sasoon that while writing Tess he had Agatha's face in mind more than any other (Sasoon, Siegfried's Journey, p. 13)." [GPL]

Michael Millgate's biography discusses several possible sources for the character Tess

Augusta Way (an 18-year-old dairymaid whom Hardy noted working on the Kingston Maurward estate in 1888)
Gertrude Bugler (a local amateur actress, who was in fact Augusta Way's daughter)
Jane Philips (the Hardys' pregnant maid at the Riverside Villa, Sturminster Newton, back in 1877)

However, Agatha Thornycroft, opposite whom Hardy sat at a dinner at the Gosses' on 2 July 1889, was the visual model for the Tess that Herkomer presented in his plates for the Graphic serialization of Tess). Having studied the available photographs, I note that Mrs. Bugler and Mrs. Thornycroft look very similar, and both indeed resemble in face the Tess working at Dairyman Crick's in Herkomer's plate. Some years after the dinner, Hardy reportedly told Gosse that he thought Agatha not merely the most beautiful woman in England, but the one "who had provided him, all unconsciously, with the physical model for Tess Durbeyfield" (Millgate 275). In particular, Hardy was taken by Agatha Thornycroft's mouth, which transferred to Tess he describes most sensuously in the novel [PVA].

Bibliography

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Online catalogue. Bonham's Sale 13394 (3 October 2005). Lot 66.

Last modified 17 October 2012