Last Of The Day's Rays

This was the only shot I managed to get today - just looking out my back door as the last of the day's sun started to fade.

I read a great article today in one of the Sunday supplements. Each week there is a feature called "The big picture" in which they print a photograph with an accompanying piece about the story of the shot and the photographer. On this occasion it related to a gloriously enigmatic image from 1923 by Dorothy Wilding, who emerged as one of the brightest stars of London's jazz age.
It's an image of 'the three graces' - who were performers in The Midnight Follies, a new cabaret, which promised a jazz age mix of comedy, dance and cocktails, at the London Metropole hotel and the photograph was designed to promote the show. 
Two of the women in the picture were well known to the gossip columns of their day. The red-haired Zoe Gordon was a star of musical theatre and of the 1919 film The Sins of Youth and the other was Sylvia Hawkes, who was known as "London's Cinderella" due to the fact that she was the daughter of a footman. Her success in The Midnight Follies would lead to a series of headline grabbing marriages to Lord Shaftesbury, with whom she scandalously eloped, and later to Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks senior, from whom she inherited a $2 million fortune, and Clark Gable.
Wilding, the photographer, even had a starry trajectory of her own. After being denied her dreams of becoming an actor or painter by the uncle who raised her she instead taught herself photography, establishing a studio in London at 21 and becoming a celebrity portraitist, taking iconic shots of the likes of Talllulah Bankhead and Noel Coward before subsequently being made the first female royal photographer (her portraits of the young Queen Elizabeth were used by the Royal Mail for its stamps). What a tale!