Gallery buys rare portrait of poet

LONDON – The National Portrait Gallery in London has bought the only surviving portrait of poet Ted Hughes by his wife and fellow poet, Sylvia Plath.

Plath sketched the drawing of Hughes in pen and ink in 1957, a year into their marriage.

Hughes destroyed many papers relating to their life together after Plath committed suicide in 1963. But he preserved the sketch and the museum bought it at an auction in London on Monday for $49,000. Hughes died in 1998.

The gallery will exhibit the portrait alongside portraits of other leading 20th-century British poets, including T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin.

Plath’s portrait, which shows Hughes lost in his writing, is believed to have been sketched on a page from one of the books that Plath sometimes used for her journal.

The marriage was famously troubled, and in February 1963 Plath killed herself at her London home, after publication of her novel, “The Bell Jar.”