Beschreibung:

The Cottingley Fairies. Alice and the Fairies, [and] Iris and the Gnome, July & September 1917, printed by Harold Snelling, c. 1920, a pair of vintage sepia gelatin silver print photographs, 108 x 148 mm & 158 x 108 mm respectively, original brown card mounts with copyright dates and captions embossed in brown and lettered 'A' and 'B', single pinhole to centre upper margin of both mounts not affecting photographs (Quantity: 2) The first, and most famous, two of the five Cottingley Fairies photographs, a hoax perpetrated by schoolgirls Frances 'Alice' Griffiths and her older cousin Elsie Wright, that deceived a number of eminent figures, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story began as a practical joke in Cottingley, near Bradford, West Yorkshire in 1917 and the fairies were actually drawings by Elsie, secured in the ground with hat pins. The story quickly got out of hand and the truth became a secret the girls decided to keep until the 1980s in order to protect the public reputations of those who believed in the 'truth' of the images. Alice was probably the name given to Frances by Conan Doyle in an attempt to help conceal the girls' identities when he published the photographs. The final three photographs were taken by the girls a year later, two of these photographs again featuring one or other of the cousins. The fifth and final one, 'The Fairy Bower', taken by Frances and showing a fairy 'cocoon' in the grass, remains open to question for some as Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that she really did see fairies and that uniquely this photograph was not faked.