Cuthbert Hamilton was born in India on 15 February 1884. He studied at the Slade between 1899 and 1903, where Wyndham Lewis was a fellow student. He then taught art at Clifton College, Bristol (1907-10). Hamilton was a member of the Fitzroy Street Group and a founding member of the London Group. He was also involved in the decoration of the ‘Cave of the Golden Calf’, the audacious cabaret club decorated with murals and sculpture by Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore and Wyndham Lewis. Hamilton’s work was shown in the final month of Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (January 1913) in London, and later that year, he joined Fry’s Omega Workshops, designing furniture, clothes and avant-garde interiors. That establishment opened its doors in Bloomsbury in July 1913. The ‘Ideal Home Exhibition’ that autumn was sponsored by the Daily Mail newspaper. According to historian Deborah S Ryan, such exhibitions serve a ‘quasi-educational’ purpose, to inform consumers about the most current household appliances and the latest fashions. The displays also contain large-scale, furnished interior ensembles by well-known commercial designers and department stores. Ryan argues that the Daily Mail commissioned the Omega Workshops for their October 1913 exhibition in a calculated move to cash in upon ‘shock-value’ of the previous year’s second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. The inclusion of an ‘Art Furniture’ section at the Ideal Home Exhibition allowed the Daily Mail to generate sensation with modernist designs that seemed radically informal compared to more traditional views of domestic respectability. The modern designs were also abstract and simple in contrast to typical Victorian ornate furnishings. However, that opportunity for large-scale publicity led to a spectacular falling out between Fry and Wyndham Lewis. Each thought that the newspaper had contracted him to design a Post-Impressionist room for the exhibition. Several scholars have since established that neither artist was present when Spencer Gore came to the Omega to arrange a meeting with the Daily Mail’s agent. When it became clear that Fry had taken charge of the design and installation of this interior, Lewis circulated a blistering letter among Omega stockholders and had it published in the newspapers. It denounced Fry’s usurpation of the commission and the Omega Workshops’ aesthetic in general: ‘As to [the Omega’s] tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin is ‘greenery-yallery,’ despite the Post-What-Not-fashionableness of its draperies.’ The letter received the backing and signatures of Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Edward Wadsworth, who would depart the Omega with him to prove their aesthetic point. Importantly, Lewis explained that this new group, the Vorticists, were prepared to do ‘the rough masculine work’ of modern art, something he claimed was impossible for ‘this family party of strayed and Dissenting Aesthetes,’ as he labelled the Omega. In October 1913, along with Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and William Roberts, Hamilton walked out in support of Lewis. They joined him when he established the Rebel Art Centre in March 1914, and later became associated with the Vorticist movement, although not all signed the Vorticist Manifesto. Hamilton served as a Special Constable during the Great War. He also experimented with sculpture and founded the Yeoman Pottery in Kensington, bringing in the Rhodesian William Staite-Murray, a recent graduate of the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. The pottery functioned from 1915 to 1919. In 1920 Hamilton exhibited with the newly-formed ‘Group X’, established by Lewis and the American poster artist Edward McKnight Kauffer to provide a focus for avant-garde activity in the post-war aftermath. Hamilton died at Cookham in Berkshire on 13 March 1959.