The twin artists Charles Maurice (1883–1908) and Edward Julius (1883–1957) Detmold have been described as ‘two of the most extraordinary figures in the annals of early modern art’. Largely self-taught artistic prodigies, they first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of thirteen. But, as researchers also observed, their lives seemed ‘destined to be ill-starred and shrouded in mystery’. Charles Maurice Detmold, who enigmatically died by suicide at the age of 24, left no known record of his life other than a two-sentence suicide note. Edward Julius lived much longer and wrote three mystical texts and an impassioned (and unpublished) anti-war manuscript, but he was notoriously reclusive and most of the documents related to his life were destroyed after his death. In this workshop presentation, I shall discuss the challenges of writing an ‘asymetrical’ joint biography of two people with very different life-spans, and explore the ways in which visual material can become a source for a biography of subjects about whom little written material survives.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita at The Australian National University. Her research focuses on modern East Asian history, themes of memory and reconciliation in history, and on the role of art in the representation of culture, nature and war. Her recent books include On the Frontiers of History (ANU Press, 2020), Japan's Living Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Nature, War and the Art of the Detmold Twins: Orientalist Dreams, Modernity’s Nightmares (Routledge, forthcoming, April 2026).