Vintage silver print photograph on Agfa paper, on original photographer's mount signed "Vladimir Nabokov / 26.II.67 / Montreux" by the subject and "Gisèle Freund / 1967" by the photographer. Stamped "Copyright by - Gisèle Freund" and "Please credit - Gisèle Freund" on verso of print. 11.75 x 9.25 inches (29.5 x 23 cm). On mat 16.75 x 12.75 inches (43 x 33 cm)Signed photographs of the writer are of notorious rarity. In over 40 years of auction records, we have traced but one other, a small format photograph (Christie's, The M. Wesley Marans Collection of Signed Photographs. Writers. 17 April, 1996). The present large example, signed additionally by the photographer and from her personal collection, is a particularly notable example. 

Gisèle Freund, widely celebrated as one of the major photographers of the 20th century, was also ground-breaking critic who authored the first doctoral study on the history of photography in 1936, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (Photography in France in the Nineteenth-Century). Freund is perhaps most celebrated for her portraits of many of the canonical writers and artists of the twentieth century—James Joyce, André Gide, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Frida Kahlo, Walter Benjamin, and Vladimir Nabokov - to name but a handful among over three hundred personalities. Her work as a photojournalist, both in color and black and white, was published across Europe and the Americas, starting in the 1930s with Life, Weekly Illustrated, Regards, Vu, Arts et Métiers Graphiques, in the 1940s, El Hogar, Sur, La Nación, Excélsior, Picture Post, then, Look, Du, Sie und Er, Novedades, Points de Vue, Marco Polo and Weekend Magazine, in the 1950s. 

Vladimir Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, but achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland. Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita ranked fourth on Modern Library's list of the 100 best 20th-century novels in 2007 and is considered one of the greatest 20th-century works of literature.