The Winter Sitting

A rediscovered contact sheet sheds new light on a sitting long thought lost to the studio fire of 1961. Cataloguers working through a recently donated box of negatives found six frames, unlabeled but unmistakable, tucked inside an envelope marked only with a date.

The sitting itself lasted under twenty minutes, according to the studio's appointment ledger, yet it produced one of the archive's most reproduced images. This new material adds context that historians have wanted for years.