Hermione Frances Etheldreda Hammond was born on 11 August 1910 at Hexham in Northumberland. She was the daughter of Captain Leslie Hammond, RN. Her father later remarked that if she had been born a day later she could have been christened ‘Grouse’. He met his future wife, a Canadian, Edith White, whilst serving on the West Indies Station in Bermuda. Naval regulations dictated that when his daughter was born, Captain Hammond had to take a shore-based post, as sea-going officers had to take half-pay, if they did not have a ship. It was peacetime and he did not. He was therefore assigned to the Admiralty, eventually managing the naval munitions factory in Dorset. It blew up in 1936. He had a stroke and was thereafter an invalid. Hermione had one brother and one sister. She attended Francis Holland School in London, her mother insisting that while she might not learn a lot there, she would make excellent and interesting friends. She did, among them the future actress Joyce Grenfell. Encouraged by her mother, herself no mean artist, she went on to study art at the Chelsea Polytechnic under Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. Hammond later recalled Moore leaning over her shoulder to examine the work on her easel and saying: ‘Just keep going on as you are.’ She then entered the Royal Academy Schools to study under Walter Russell and Tom Monnington. She learned mural decoration at the Royal College of Art and attended night-classes in etching. She supported herself by winning prizes and doing odd jobs. One such was the altarpiece in the ecumenical chapel of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. After winning the competition to decorate the ceiling of the Senate House of London University in 1937, Hammond gained a Rome Scholarship in 1938, but her studies in Italy were cut short by the outbreak of war. She met the future Pope Pius XII and later attended his coronation in St Peter’s Basilica. With an added sense of urgency, she absorbed all she could of the Italian Renaissance in Rome, Florence, Arezzo and Ravenna and left Mussolini’s Italy for England via Switzerland. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s daughter Dorothy was Hammond’s best friend, during the critical period before the war she several times visited Chequers. ‘I am very worried, Hitler is a very dangerous man’, Hermione remembered him telling her one day during a walk. She was behind a curtain at No. 10 Downing Street in September 1939 when Chamberlain made his famous broadcast that Britain was at war with Germany. During the war, she captured those aspects of bomb-damaged London that had never been visible before and were soon to be hidden again by rebuilding. She later designed the altarpiece in Marlborough House School, Tenterden. In 1949 she took the Glebe Place studio in Chelsea that she would occupy for the rest of her life. During the Victorian era, many artists’ studios were built there, with large glass roofs providing natural northern light, considered the best for painting. When she arrived, most of the 40 studios were occupied by artists. The painters Pietro Annigoni, Edward le Bas, William Rothenstein, Alfred Egerton Cooper and Nina Hamnett, the sculptors Derwent Wood and David McFall all lived and worked there at various times. In her late eighties, Hammond is recorded as telling one journalist that she was proud to have ‘lived by my brush, without having to sink to teaching as yet’. One of Hammond’s most interesting commissions was one to decorate, in collage, the Director’s rooms of the Institute of Historical Research at London University. Of its then Director, Professor Francis Wormald, she painted a portrait for the Society of Antiquaries. Other portrait commissions included Sir John Peel for the Assembly of the Western European Union in Paris, Dr Kate Bertram for Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and a number of studies of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, before her first concert. Hammond’s works were acquired by such institutions as the Guildhall of the City of London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow; the Fondation Custodia in Paris; the Museum of London and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Her solo exhibition venues included Colnaghi’s, Arthur Jeffress Gallery, the Bishopsgate Institute, New Grafton Gallery, the University of Madison, Wisconsin, Hartnoll & Eyre and Michael Parkin. Hermione Hammond died in London at the great age of 94, on 29 July 2005.