Vintage Gelatin Silver Photograph
”You have been busy, hunting down with mathematics, the two ancient entities, time and space, while I have been lecturing in this country on the eternal world of man, the universe of reality..." --Tagore, beginning his conversation with Einstein
LARGE VINTAGE GELATIN SILVER PHOTOGRAPH by Martin Vos of the historic meeting between the Nobel laureates Einstein and Tagore on July 14, 1930.
Einstein and Tagore first met on July 14, 1930 (the date of this photograph) at Einstein’s home in Caputh, near Berlin to discuss the nature of reality. The text of the conversation first appeared in the New York Times magazine on August 10. “The newspaper featured it prominently beneath the headline ‘Einstein and Tagore Plumb the Truth.’ The byline was given as Dmitri Marianoff, a Russian journalist known to the Einsteins for several years, who married Margot Einstein in November 1930. In his preamble, Marianoff wrote: ‘It was interesting to see them together -- Tagore, the poet with the head of a thinker, and Einstein, the thinker with the head of a poet... Neither sought to press his opinion. But it seemed to an observer as though two planets were engaged in a chat’” (Robinson, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore).
The image is the rare large format: 10 5/8” x 13 5/8”; measuring in the original matte: 17.25” x 14”. (There was also a smaller size produced.) In additional archival 16x20” matte. Signed by Vos in the negative. Vintage: Printed at the time of the photograph; from the estate of a 1930s newspaper reporter. Fine condition.
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