On a snowy Tuesday in February 1920, the war poet Siegfried Sassoon sat for Kahlil Gibran in New York and wrote a few lines about it in his journal that evening. Francesco Medici uses them to put a name to a portrait that had sat unidentified in Beirut for a century.
By Francesco Medici
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KAHLIL GIBRAN COLLECTIVE
By Francesco Medici · Kahlil Gibran Collective · 2018 · kahlilgibran.com
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Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886–1967), well known as a highly decorated English soldier and writer, was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His verse, which described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic spirit, greatly influenced Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), the most famous poet-soldier of English literature, to whom Sassoon was mentor.
On 28 January 1920, Sassoon arrived in New York for a lecture tour, and Gibran — eager to draw him for his "Temple of Art" — secured an appointment with him on 10 February. On that cold and snowy Tuesday the two lunched together, and Sassoon accepted an invitation to sit for a portrait. After returning to the Seville Hotel at 88 Madison Avenue, Sassoon wrote in his notebook:
Tues. 10th – Dreary morning of thawing snow. Lunched with Kahlil Gibran, a little Syrian artist & poet; he did a drawing of me. He has done [John] Masefield & [William Butler] Yeats with success, & showed me [Auguste] Rodin & [Claude] Debussy, which looked all right. He seems a very nice creature. Nothing commercial about his point of view.1
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Thanks to this unique document it is now possible to attach an identity to a portrait that had until now sat unnamed among the others held by the Gibran National Committee in Beirut.
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1 Sassoon Journals, Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, MS Add.9852/1/14, Journal, 21 January 1920 – 22 April 1920. Cambridge Digital Library. ↩
This article is based on an excerpt from the paper "Tracing Gibran's Footsteps: Unpublished and Rare Material," in Gibran in the 21st Century: Lebanon's Message to the World, edited by H. Zoghaib and M. Rihani (Beirut: Center for Lebanese Heritage, LAU, 2018), pp. 93–145.
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