Before the mountain - George Mallory in photographs by Vanessa Bell, paintings by Duncan Grant

 

 George Mallory photographed by Vanessa Bell at 38 Brunswick Square, circa 1912.

George Herbert Leigh-Mallory (18 June 1886 – 8 or 9 June 1924) is a mountaineering legend for his famous attempts to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Three times in four years he made the climb - each time leaving behind his wife and three small children - and on the third try, in June of 1924, along with his climbing partner Sandy Irvine, and only days away from his thirty-eighth birthday, he was lost.

Mallory by Duncan Grant, 1912.

Mallory by Duncan Grant, 1913.

In 2015, thirty-four letters and cards that Mallory wrote to Lytton Strachey were auctioned at Bonhams. They were written over a period of twelve years, from 1909 - when Mallory was still an undergraduate at Cambridge - to 1921, while traveling to Tibet and his first encounter (reconnaissance) with Everest. His pre-Everest biography, his involvement with the Bloomsbury group, Fabianism, radical education, and his military career during WWI, has been more fully explored in recent decades. But this new material shows yet a different side of the famous mountaineer. Known for his grace as a climber, his writing is just as elegant. Also quite candid: flirtatious, bitchy, gossipy, sometimes witty, and sexually frank. 

Again, Mallory photographed by Vanessa Bell at 38 Brunswick Square, circa 1912. (Five images.)

He was introduced to Lytton by the latter's brother, James Strachey, and Mallory and Lytton quickly developed a close friendship. While certainly being flattered by Lytton's attentions, Mallory appears to have skillfully avoided turning the relationship into something sexual. (Though Mallory and Strachey's brother James had an apparently unsuccessful sexual encounter.) But Lytton was fairly obsessed with the six years younger Mallory from the start, writing to Vanessa Bell:

"Mon Dieu! George Mallory! My hand trembles, my heart palpitates ... he's six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible – the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an imaginable English boy." 

Mallory at Cambridge, circa 1905-09.

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In 1911, Vanessa Bell's siblings, Virginia (she married Leonard Woolf the following year) and Adrian Stephen leased No. 38 Brunswick Square, inviting Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant to join them. Her photographs of Mallory most likely were meant as preparatory studies for Grant.