Virginia Woolf on Walter Sickert's painting 'Ennui' – with Hermione Lee

Virginia Woolf, the famous author, wrote an essay 'Walter Sickert: a conversation' on the painting of Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert in 1933, which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK. Woolf describes how she imagines the characters in the painting as an old publican, 'with his glass on the table before him and a cigar at his lips.'

Professor Dame Hermione Lee is a biographer and critic who was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University.

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