Item 17: Photographs of Florence Kahn (1913)

Innately conservative and cautious, Beerbohm nonetheless embarked on a bold experiment in 1910, abandoning London for a more private (and cheaper) life in Italy with his wife, Florence. He also began toying with a new medium, photography, seen in these intimate photographs of Florence, who drew on her earlier experience as a photographer’s model in New York. Over the next 40 years, she made only a few brief returns to professional acting, instead focusing her time on her husband and their social affairs. When she died in 1951, her responsibilities were assumed by Elisabeth Jungmann (1894–1958), Beerbohm’s German Jewish secretary, whom he married in 1956 on his deathbed.