CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/14/2021

Valentine's Day is complicated. Celebrate with 'Love Stories' both passionate and tragic

This June 2, 1943, Dorothy Wilding portrait of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, and Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, captures that ineffable thing about one of the greatest and perhaps most tragic loves of the twentieth century. Taken seven years after the Duke abdicated the throne rather than "discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love," it is not only a portrait of passion, but of monumental sacrifice and exile, reproduced from Love Stories: Art, Passion & Tragedy, our Valentine's Day Staff Pick. "While they remained loyal to one another until their deaths," Constantia Nicolaides writes, "questions abound about Edward’s real motivations for abdicating, and whether Wallis truly loved Edward or intended for their relationship to progress so far. Indeed, she reportedly remarked: ‘You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.'"