Thelma Wood

Thelma Wood was a silverpoint artist in Paris in the 1920s and the woman Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood about. She came from Kansas, arrived in Paris in her early twenties, and worked in silverpoint - drawing with a metal stylus on prepared ground, a demanding fifteenth-century technique nobody was using - producing images of animals and plants with a strange sexual charge that were exhibited and admired and are now hard to find. She was tall, wore men's clothes, drank enormously, and was known across Montparnasse. She and Barnes lived together for about eight years from 1922 and the relationship was possessive on both sides and destroyed by Wood's drinking and her habit of disappearing for nights at a time; Barnes called it, afterwards, the thing that ruined her life. Nightwood, published in 1936, turns her into Robin Vote, the woman everyone in the book loses, and the portrait is unsparing enough that Wood was said never to have forgiven it. Barnes maintained she had written the book so that Wood would not be forgotten, which is a claim about her own motives that the book does not entirely support. Wood left Paris in 1931, lived with the sculptor Henriette Metcalf for many years in Connecticut, and died in 1970. Her drawings survive mostly in private hands. Silverpoint lines cannot be erased, which is part of why almost nobody uses the technique. Barnes kept a drawing of hers on the wall of the Patchin Place flat for forty years. Wood stopped drawing entirely in later life.

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