6 Aug 1921

6 August 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland

Richard,
  You sent me a beautiful postcard. Yes I agree about the hands & the angle of the head is so lovely. I mean how the chin is tucked in - that gives a kind of little delicate spring to the eyebrows & even the corners of the lips . . . or doesn't it? A poor ignorant writer asks.
  We have just been doing the flowers before we start work. Scene: the salle a manger, with windows wide open & pink curtings flapping. The table bare & heaped with petunias, snapdragons & nasturtiums. Glass vases & bowls full of water - a general sense of buds and wetness & that peculiar stickiness of fresh stalks. Jack - white shirt with sleeves up to his shoulders, white duck trousers & rope shoes snipping with a large pair of wet scissors. Me - blue cotton kimono & pink slippers afilling of the vases . . .  Jack is terribly keen on petunias, I wish I could send you a whole great bastick full. They are wonderful flowers - almost pure light - and yet an exquisite starry shape. We have every colour from pale pink to almost blackish purple. And do you know the smell of snapdragons? My dear boy. I must here pause or you will walk away. But tell me - why do people paint for ever bottils and onions? A white snapdragon, for instance, just for a change would be worth it, surely. Richard - I wish I could unobtrusively give you these things - leave flowers instead of foundlings on your studio doorstep, in fact. Perhaps one day I shall be able to . . .

[To Richard Murry in Collected Letters, 9 August, 1921.]