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Chambers, Helen
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003385677-3
Abstract
During the winter, seven months before Conrad’s death, the American artist Walter Tittle painted a striking portrait of him in oils, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Conrad sits in a wooden armchair, his deeply lined face illuminated, eyes gazing calmly into the distance, against an imagined backdrop of heavy seas, a pale gold streak of horizon visible below dark rain clouds. The textual analogue of this image is to be found in the nostalgic, at times valedictory maritime writings in Last Essays, and in Notes on Life and Letters, as well as in his much earlier impressionistic reminiscences The Mirror of the Sea and parts of A Personal Record. In his correspondence throughout his life, Conrad recalled his sea voyages and the vessels in which he had served.