An Englishman in New York
Valentine Lawford in Horst P. Horst’s studio in New York, 1950s (LWFD 6/1)
Valentine Lawford (1911-91) was a rising star in the Foreign Office, a young diplomat who’d held prestigious posts in Paris, London and New York, when he made a momentous decision. In 1948, he chose to give up his conventional existence and reinvent himself as an artist and writer, settling in the United States with his partner, celebrated photographer Horst P. Horst. Recent additions to his papers at Churchill Archives Centre cast new light on their creative collaboration and the life they made together as a gay couple in the mid-twentieth century.
In some senses, Valentine Lawford’s story can be told through three houses, the first of which was Quickley in Chorleywood, where he grew up in an upper-middle class naval family, the son of Captain Vincent and Agnes Jane Lawford. He left home for school at Repton and then university at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. At an early age he also discovered a love of travel and a talent for languages, which he would go on to study as an undergraduate, and found himself drawn to the cultures of France, Austria and Germany. He detailed his formative experiences of journeys to other places in his letters to his parents and his published memoir Bound for Diplomacy (1963). Yet he returned time and again, in the same letters and later reminiscences, to idyllic childhood memories of family and home and to his affinity with nature, animals, gardening and painting that he traced back to that place.
Valentine Lawford with Atalanta, 1922 (LWFD 6/1)
As the title of his memoir suggests, Valentine Lawford felt in retrospect both destined, by background, education and interests, for a career in the diplomatic service and confined by it. His memoir and private letters describe the personalities, conventions and mysteries of the vast institution of the Foreign Office from the viewpoint of a newcomer to the Third Rooms of the Central Department, 1934-7, and the Paris Embassy, 1937-9. He observed official occasions, visiting dignitaries and the routine rhythms intermittently punctuated by crises (which occasioned long hours of “decyphering + cyphering + telephoning”) with detachment and a keen eye for the absurd.
“The mastery of any art, even the minor art of drafting telegrams, interviewing strangers, cooing to one’s foreign colleagues on the telephone and knowing automatically what was the acceptable thing to say at an inter-departmental meeting, had a satisfaction of its own.”
Valentine Lawford, Bound for Diplomacy (1963)
Invitation to a reception for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, 1938 (LWFD 4/1)
Valentine Lawford’s social life in Paris revolved around the artistic and the fashionable. He was quickly adopted by the interior designer, Elsie de Wolfe, the wife of his colleague, Charles Mendl. He first glimpsed this intriguing blue-haired person arriving at an Embassy function in a Rolls-Royce accompanied by her miniature Schnauzer. Swept up into her world, he spent weekends at her country house, Villa Trianon in Versailles, and was introduced into her glamorous circle of socialites and celebrities. He also explored the contemporary cultural scene in Paris in the company of artists and writers, like his friend, the painter Paul Maze.
“Then we drove off to Gertrude Stein’s, a beautiful old eighteenth century house painted white + filled with rather good modern pictures. There we met Salvador Dali (the leader of the ‘Surrealists’) + of course Elsie said ‘And do you paint, too?’ ”
Letter from Valentine Lawford to his parents, 22 May 1938 (LWFD 2/6)
Telephone message from Gertrude Stein, May1938 (LWFD 4/1)
The house that came to symbolise this period in Valentine Lawford’s life was La Motte-Quarrée at Bièvres, home of his friends Jack and Anne Crawshay. It provided a welcome refuge from the strain of his work at the Embassy, as political crises worsened and he found himself privately opposed to the official policy of appeasement, convinced that fascism and authoritarianism could only be defeated by resistance. In memory, the house and its garden also became the scene of two defining moments in his life: the first intimation of his appointment as assistant private secretary to the Foreign Secretary in 1938, which prompted his return to London, and his decision to leave the diplomatic service for good in 1948. He made a final poignant visit to the house, by then a ruin, shortly before its demolition in 1963.
“I have always been as sensitive to places as to people”
Notes for an unpublished memoir, A House Near Paris, undated (LWFD 5/7)
Valentine Lawford’s years in London, 1939-46, when he worked as assistant private secretary to three Foreign Secretaries - Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin - are documented in a small number of published articles and typescript extracts from his diaries and letters. A dedicated diarist, only one of his original diaries survives in the collection here, along with a handful of letters from the war years.
Valentine Lawford’s diary, 1943-4 (LWFD 1)
After the war, Valentine Lawford was sent to New York as a member of the UK delegation to the newly established United Nations, where he worked for that éminence grise of the Archives Centre’s collections, Alexander Cadogan. There he fell in love with the city and later with the man who would become his partner, German-American photographer Horst P. Horst (1906-99). As described in his biography of Horst, they met at a party in New York in 1947 and Horst subsequently invited him to spend an afternoon at his home on Long Island with other guests including Noel Coward, Christopher Isherwood and Greta Garbo. They began to live together that autumn and Valentine Lawford accepted a final post at the British Embassy in Tehran, 1949-50, before returning to settle permanently with Horst in the United States.
“When the liner docked, I was driven to the U. K. Delegation’s living quarters at the Savoy Plaza hotel, on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street. Today, the Savoy Plaza is no more…. For me, almost half a century later, it still represents the New York that I first knew, and fell in love with, and that was to become my enduring idea, right or wrong, of the centre of the 20th century world.”
Notes on New York, 1980s (LWFD 3/9)
Valentine Lawford’s United States immigration papers, 1956 (LWFD 4/3)
The house at Cove Neck Road, Oyster Bay, Long Island was where Valentine Lawford lived for the rest of his life. In 1946, Horst had acquired a piece of land on the derelict estate of Louis Comfort Tiffany, where he designed and built a house in the Modernist style. Writing about the house in an article for Vogue, illustrated with Horst’s photographs and published in 1966, Valentine Lawford wasn’t free to include himself in the picture, although his presence can surely be detected in an English portrait or a book-lined room. In his private letters, however, his frequent references to decorating choices, alterations, maintenance and domestic arrangements, make it clear how much the house was the couple’s shared home and an intensely personal project for both of them. The most lengthy descriptions in the letters are devoted to the garden - with its floral courtyards, formal planting, woodland and swimming pond - which was Valentine Lawford’s particular passion and which he cultivated over many years.
“It is fun to go on an expedition but I am always so glad to get home afterwards! This little place is not like anything in America at all: when you are here you have no thought of the world outside, streets, cars or people.”
Letter from Valentine Lawford to his parents, 2 May 1957 (LWFD 2/11)
Valentine Lawford on the terrace at Oyster Bay, [1957] (LWFD 6/2)
Cove Neck Road was a private place of domesticity and retreat from the couple’s hectic city life and travels, “so Arcadian and sheltered and remote”. But it was also a sociable space where they entertained and surrounded themselves with friends, most of them creative people and many of them gay. Even before the building was complete, Horst had used the house and garden as a backdrop for his work as a fashion photographer and they both continued to draw on it as a resource to inspire and stage new creative projects. Again, Valentine Lawford’s private letters reveal the full extent of their collaboration and involvement in each other’s work and the variety of their artistic initiatives, whether Horst’s photographs of still lifes, gardens and interiors or Valentine Lawford’s paintings. With Horst’s encouragement, he began to make a living as a painter of landscapes, flowers and portraits, showing in galleries and undertaking private and commercial commissions.
Valentine Lawford working on a charcoal portrait, inspired by Horst’s photograph, of Edith Sitwell, [1955] (LWFD 6/1)
Valentine Lawford's flower paintings sent as Christmas cards to family and friends, 1980s (LWFD 4/3)
Valentine Lawford’s paintings of flowers sent as Christmas cards to friends and family, 1980s (LWFD 4/3)
Valentine Lawford first forays as a writer were autobiographical. He published one volume of memoir and a handful of articles based on his past experiences of diplomatic life and travel, working sporadically throughout his life on a second volume of memoir, A House Near Paris, which remained unpublished. In 1962, his writing took a new direction when Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue, commissioned a series of lifestyle features from Horst and offered them their first formal opportunity to collaborate as photographer and writer. Beginning with a profile of their friend Consuelo Balsan, they combined their talents to explore the visual and biographical possibilities of portraying individuals and couples in their homes and gardens, surrounded by their cherished possessions, giving intimate insights into interior worlds. They produced these features over the next two decades, a selection of which were published as Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People in 1968, and continued working together on catalogues of Horst’s exhibitions and eventually his biography, published in 1984, in a partnership that was always both personal and creative.
“I think I never worked so hard, even when I was Secretary to the war-time Foreign Secretaries in London! But it is good to be able to do it, and I am very happy in my heart. It is nice, too, to write the articles illustrated by Horst’s beautiful photographs. A pity we never thought of working together before - so everyone says.”
Letter from Valentine Lawford to his mother, 2 February1964 (LWFD 2/12)
Valentine Lawford at Shangri La, the home of socialite Doris Duke in Hawaii, [1966] (LWFD 6/2)
“Few things are more fascinating than the opportunity to see how other people live during their private hours - in the rooms they love, in the gardens they have planted, among their personal possessions, pursuing their favorite interests, enjoying their special comforts, organizing their domestic arrangements to fit the pattern of their individual lives.”
Diana Vreeland in the Introduction to Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People (1968)
Further Reading
Valentine Lawford, Bound for Diplomacy (1963)
Horst P. Horst and Valentine Lawford, Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People (1968)
Valentine Lawford, Horst: His Work and His World (1984)
Susanna Brown (ed), Horst: Photographer of Style (2014)
Horst P. Horst - an introduction, article on the V&A website
Around That Time, Condé Nast Archive exhibition by Ivan Shaw on Google Arts & Culture
Herry Lawford’s family history blog posts about Valentine Lawford
With thanks to Charles Tilbury and Jeremy Lawford for the generous donation of Valentine Lawford’s papers.
Browse the catalogue or contact Sophie Bridges for further information.