Nina Hamnett was born at Tenby in Pembrokeshire on 14 February 1890. She attended the Academy for Young Ladies at Westgate-on-Sea, the Royal School in Bath, and then studied at the Dublin School of Art, the Pelham Art School (1906-07) and on the advice of George Clausen, the London School of Art until 1910. In her memoirs, Hamnett wrote tellingly of Frank Brangwyn ‘He was not a good professor, he had too much personality to teach well.’ She became friends with Aleister Crowley, Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler. Hamnett satisified her curiosity about sex by losing her virginity in some rented rooms in Fitzroy Square and later discovered that the poets Verlaine and Rimbaud had stayed there. She asked Walter Sickert ‘Do you think that they will put up a blue plaque on the house for me, or will they put one up for Verlaine and Rimbaud?’ Sickert replied ‘My dear, they will put up one on the front for you and one on the back for them.’ In 1914 Hamnett went to Montparnasse in Paris, to study at Marie Vassilieff’s Academy, where Fernand Léger taught. On her first night there, she went to the Café La Rotonde, where the man at the next table introduced himself as ‘Modigliani, painter and Jew’. In addition to making friends with Modigliani, Picasso, Diaghilev, Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, she stayed for a while at La Ruche, with many of the leading members of the avant-garde. In Montparnasse, she also met her mysterious future husband, the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian, who also called himself Count Edgar de Bergen. Flamboyantly unconventional and openly bisexual, Hamnett once danced nude on a Montparnasse café table just for the ‘hell of it’. She drank heavily, was promiscuous and kept numerous lovers. Her reputation soon reached London, where for a time, she worked for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, assisting him with the avant-garde productions of fabrics, clothes, murals, furniture, rugs, geegaws and the like, in addition to modelling dresses for them. Shortly after she joined the workshop, her paintings were featured in several group exhibitions of contributing Omega artists, which included Vanessa Bell, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Duncan Grant, among others. Influenced by Fry and modern French art, Hamnett painted portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, café and pub scenes. Her declared ambition was ‘to paint psychological portraits that shall represent accurately the spirit of the age’. Hamnett excelled as a draughtsman. Her fluent, sensitive, often witty lines and simplified forms testify to the lasting influence of both Gaudier-Brzeska and Modigliani. Primarily a portrait and landscape painter, she exhibited at the NEAC, the RA, the London Group and at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. She taught at the Westminster Technical Institute from 1917 to 1918. After divorcing Kristian, she took up with the composer E J Moeran. Hamnett illustrated The Silent Queen (1927) by Seymour Leslie and The People’s Album of London Statues (1928) by Osbert Sitwell. In 1932 she published her frank and humorous Laughing Torso, the story of her bohemian life, which became a bestseller. Crowley unsportingly sued both her and the publisher for libel, over allegations of black magic use in the book. In his thunderous summing up to the jury, Mr Justice Swift said: ‘I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man (Crowley) who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.’ Hamnett won the case, but at great personal cost. She took to the demon drink and spent a large part of the remaining decades of her life propping up the bar of the Fitzroy Tavern, on the corner of Charlotte and Windmill Streets, trading anecdotes for drinks. Twenty-three years after her first autobiography was published, she released a follow-up entitled: Is She a Lady? Hamnett died in London on 16 December 1956 from complications, after falling out her apartment window and being impaled on a fence 40 feet below. There has since been some debate whether or not it was a suicide attempt, or merely a drunken accident. Her last words apparently were, ‘Why don’t they let me die?’ A biography, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia, by Denise Hooker was published in 1986.