Sir Leslie Stephen, Lady Albutt, Julia Duckworth Stephen, Gerald Duckworth, Sir Clifford Albutt, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian Stephen sitting outdoors

St. Ives, 1892

“The family spent their summers in Cornwall, another place of respite, a pastoral retreat from the imprisonment of London. Talland House is often set in convenient contrast to the Gothic gloom of 22 Hyde Park Gate. St Ives is depicted as a place of colour, exhilaration and freedom. To the Lighthouse can be read as an elegy for the time spent there with the family. Virginia recalls her earliest memory: she is lying in the nursery, listening to the waves breaking on the beach, hearing the wind rhythmically suck the sunshine-yellow blind in and out of the room, its little acorn-shaped pull tugging across the floor. The images are of light, water and moving air. Virginia remembers ‘the purest ecstasy I can conceive.’”

- Gill Lowe in Hyde Park Gate News