Entwined for Life | Lucy Scholes

Final yr, on vacation in Cornwall, I discovered a replica of A Personal View of Stanley Spencer in a secondhand bookshop. I used to be just a few miles from St. Ives, the fishing village the place the eccentric English painter—whose work impressed, amongst others, Lucian Freud—and his second spouse, Patricia Preece, spent their six-week honeymoon in the summertime of 1937. The ebook is Preece’s memoir of their extremely unconventional and sometimes fraught relationship, ghostwritten by the novelist and biographer Louise Collis within the spring of 1962, three years after Spencer’s loss of life. Collis wrote below Preece’s shut route, within the first individual, as a result of, as she explains within the introduction she later added to the textual content, “it was originally intended that the book should be published under her name alone.”

In her introduction, Collis admits that earlier than assembly Preece she’d heard sufficient gossip to place her on her guard: that Preece had ensorceled Spencer, thus wrecking his marriage to his first spouse, Hilda Carline; rapaciously spent his cash; then refused him his marital rights, declining, all through their marriage, to reside with him. Briefly, she’d made his life a distress. However the lady Collis met was “charming,” form, and keen to speak. The 2 of them rapidly established a rapport. In 1972, six years after Preece died, the ebook they’d labored on collectively—now described by Collis as her “memorial to a strange friend”—was lastly printed.

Flicking by its pages, my eye caught one of many images: Preece and Spencer on their wedding ceremony day, outdoors the registrar’s workplace within the Berkshire city of Maidenhead, close to the village of Cookham the place they lived (individually). Spencer stands stiffly in the course of the body—a relatively creepy, goblin-like man, notably shorter than each his bride, who’s on his proper, and his greatest man, on his left. He wears an unbecoming, floppy-brimmed canvas hat, and his thick-framed, bottle-bottomed spectacles enlarge his eyes. Preece’s face is half-hidden by her personal giant hat; she appears to be like not on the digital camera however off to the proper. It’s an ungainly tableau, with no hint of intimacy.

It wasn’t till final month, at an exhibition at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, that I spotted a fourth determine had been cropped out of the image within the ebook: Dorothy Hepworth, described in A Personal View as Preece’s “lifelong friend.” Her hair neatly Eton-cropped, sporting a buttoned-up cardigan, shirt, tie, and lengthy skirt, she grasps a big leather-based purse defensively in entrance of her. Within the unique picture, the 4 figures are neatly cut up down the center. Two {couples}: Spencer and his greatest man, Jas Wooden, on the proper; Preece and Hepworth on the left. The 2 ladies are standing shut, Preece’s physique leaning barely into Hepworth’s, their arms touching. They’re the actual couple right here.

It was in reality Preece and Hepworth, not Preece and Spencer, who spent the following wedding ceremony evening collectively and boarded the practice for St. Ives the next morning. (Spencer, in the meantime, remained in Cookham to complete a portray he was engaged on, throughout which period he slept along with his first spouse.) Not that they have been giddy newlyweds. By the point the picture was taken, the 2 ladies had been romantically concerned for nineteen years.

They met in 1918, when Hepworth was twenty-three and Preece was twenty-four, as college students at London’s Slade College of High quality Artwork. Hepworth grew up in a affluent family within the Midlands metropolis of Leicester. Her father was a distinguished knitwear producer, and her mom had her personal cash from her household’s sheep-farming enterprise. They have been modern-minded, supportive of each Hepworth’s ambitions and people of her youthful sister, Marjorie, who studied science at Somerville School, Oxford.

Preece’s background was much less prosperous, although hardly impoverished. She was born within the London borough of Kensington and christened Ruby Vivien; her father was a military officer. Her youth was considerably extra eventful than Hepworth’s. At eighteen she modified her named to Patricia, as Denys J. Wilcox writes in his new ebook The Secret Artwork of Dorothy Hepworth aka Patricia Preece, “after a scandal the previous year surrounding the death of W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), when she had been swimming in his lake and Gilbert died from a heart attack whilst attempting to rescue her from drowning.” The coroner declared it an unintentional loss of life, however a sure notoriety persevered. She additionally participed within the ladies’s suffrage motion, and was briefly engaged to a naval officer.

Preece arrived on the Slade in the summertime of 1918. She and Hepworth had a right away connection, and shortly they have been inseparable, surreptitiously spending their weekend nights collectively in Hepworth’s faculty room. After they left the Slade in 1921—Hepworth graduated with First Class honors—they arrange in a studio, which got here with a small residence, on close by Gower Avenue. It was paid for by Hepworth’s father, as was widespread on the time for households of her class and means. What was much less standard was that they lived there as a pair, sharing a mattress, as they might do for the subsequent forty-five years.

These weren’t accepting occasions. Lesbianism wasn’t criminalized, like male homosexuality was, however it was hardly tolerated. So polluting was it regarded as, Wilcox reminds us, that in 1928 the editor of the Sunday Categorical declared that he would “rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid” than enable them to learn Radclyffe Corridor’s new sapphic novel The Effectively of Loneliness. On the identical time, many younger working ladies in London cohabited as flatmates, particularly within the aftermath of World Struggle I, when a era of marriageable females misplaced their potential companions and needed to search for different fashions of economic safety and home companionship. The elevated ubiquity of those platonic shared dwelling preparations seemingly made issues simpler for {couples} like Hepworth and Preece, anointing their home setup with a level of legitimacy.

The exhibit at Charleston, “Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story,” features a assortment of Hepworth’s pencil sketches from these years. Generally, as in Lady in Profile and Seated Lady (each circa 1920), the mannequin is unidentified, however Preece is the determine who dominates. Hepworth attracts her lover again and again, absolutely clothed and bare. There’s a sketch of Hepworth’s mom from the identical interval, the older lady seated on a picket chair, her palms clasped collectively in her lap, her face in stern however calm repose. Hepworth’s pencil traces are agency and clear; the our bodies of her fashions are substantial, shapely beneath their garments, however it’s the faces that command consideration, a wealthy sense of character achieved in just a few traces.

That there aren’t any works by Preece from this era isn’t unusual. Shortly after transferring in collectively, the lovers launched into an inventive collaboration. Because the extra charismatic of the 2—very a lot a New Lady—Preece cannily sought out the help of Roger Fry, London’s preeminent artwork critic and a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. Leaving her shier associate of their studio, Preece took examples of each their work to Fry’s house. Unimpressed by Preece’s work, Fry instantly acknowledged Hepworth’s expertise, however relatively than admitting which work belonged to whom, Preece let Fry consider that she was answerable for the superior canvasses.

It was the beginning of an elaborate deception. Henceforth Hepworth signed all of her work together with her lover’s title, then Preece took it out into the world to promote as her personal. Fry, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, and Gwen Raverat have been just some of the artists and critics who publicly championed and supported Hepworth’s portray for years, all whereas believing that Preece was the artist.

The reality wasn’t extensively made public till after each their deaths—Preece died in 1966, Hepworth in 1978—when, within the Nineties, the curator and collector Michael Dickens organized a sequence of posthumous exhibitions that correctly attributed the artwork. However “An Untold Story” is the primary present to supply a complete account of Hepworth and Preece’s life collectively alongside the work. Charleston is a becoming venue: primarily Vanessa Bell’s house, it additionally served as each studio and canvas for the Bloomsbury Group, which Preece and Hepworth finally joined, because of Fry’s patronage, as, in Preece’s phrases, “junior members.” It was a fantastic honor, even when they discovered the gatherings “rather solemn” and reeking of “the exclusive club atmosphere.”

The work themselves make up a revealingly intimate assortment, a panorama of quiet, home village life. Many characteristic the inside of Hepworth and Preece’s cottage: small, darkish rooms, filled with furnishings, with low, sloping ceilings; snapshots of the ladies’s non-public life collectively. Hepworth’s early nonetheless lifes, some painted in the course of the 4 years within the early Nineteen Twenties when the couple lived in Paris—Fry had prompt they decamp there—echo Cezanne’s: burnished oranges or rosy apples amongst wine bottles and polished earthenware cassoulet pots. There’s a shocking early oil (circa 1920) of Preece perched on stones on a seaside in Cornwall that’s extra impressionistic than Hepworth’s later portraits of her lover: the vivid pink of Preece’s costume clashes delightfully with the wealthy, mustardy tones of the panorama.

The present consists of lots of Hepworth’s later nudes, painted within the mid-Thirties, which have a comfortable, sultry voluptuousness: in After the Tub and Mannequin with Pink Hair (each circa 1937) the sitters are perched on chairs, unadorned however for towels draped over their legs. The darkish backdrop of every portray accentuates the gleaming brightness of naked flesh. The creamy rose-tinted hue of the pores and skin of the girl in After the Tub glows gently, whereas the alabaster coolness of the red-haired lady emits a fluoresence that mirrors the sunshine reflecting off of the big white porcelain jug and bowl on the washstand beside her. Drawings of her nude lover from a decade earlier, in the meantime, though manifestly erotic—Preece’s legs unfold extensive—are tender and loving too, particularly when in comparison with what Preece herself described because the “twisted sensuality and…amazing ugliness” of Spencer’s later portraits of her.

A number of the most distinguished canvases within the exhibition are portraits that Hepworth painted of varied neighbors. Their home, Louie Farrell, was a favourite mannequin. Hepworth painted her as she would anybody else, seated correctly relatively than going about her every day duties: in a diary entry from the late Nineteen Twenties Preece known as her “useless as a daily” however “the most paintable model we’ve had since Paris.” One other common was the village’s aged baker, the delightfully named Ben Buttery, who’d honed his abilities as a sitter modeling for Spencer. With a bottle of beer at hand, such because the one at his aspect in Ben Buttery and Beer Bottle (circa 1932), he was content material to sit down for hours. These work are casual and heat, their setting resolutely homely.

One might argue that this was the one mise-en-scène safely accessible to Hepworth, however her dealings with Farrell recommend that she was considerably much less within the stature of her sitters than within the complexities of their faces. Portraiture was clearly her métier, as the majority of the exhibition attests, however not like most different portraitists of expertise, she was unable to tackle extra prestigious commissions. In 1935, in an try to assist Preece earn some much-needed cash, Bell requested her, on behalf of her sister Woolf, to attract a portrait of the composer Dame Ethel Smyth. Bell even supplied Preece her personal London studio, because the aged sitter wouldn’t schlep out to Cookham. “I think if you’d do the portrait of a well-known person like that it might possibly lead to other orders, and it would certainly be seen by lots of people,” she wrote benevolently, utilizing an argument that was laborious to rebut. Alas, Preece needed to flip it down; “she could not reasonably have taken Dorothy along to make the drawing,” Wilcox writes, “without exposing their secret.” Each Bell and Woolf assumed that the artist was too shy.  

As Kenneth Pople argues in Stanley Spencer: A Biography (1991),  Hepworth “simply wanted to be allowed to devote her whole life to painting.” That was fortunate because the couple wanted the cash: after Hepworth’s father died within the early Thirties, it was revealed that the household had nothing left. Pople and Wilcox each be aware that Hepworth took on the historically “male” function of artist and supplier, whereas Preece acted as helpmeet. However in different methods their relationship subverted these dynamics. In 1932, pissed off by their worsening funds, Preece recounted in her diary how “disagreeable” her associate had change into. Wilcox relates that Hepworth responded in pencil the next day—itself proof of the intimacy between them—invoking her sister, with whom she had a strained relationship:

Every day sees my life nearer break, and my portray I’ve resigned to make nothing. I can’t assist respecting those that can push and get one thing. I want to God somebody like Marjorie would do it for me in order that I might proceed to color. I can’t assist respecting it and need I lived with Marjorie. Not Marjorie, I hate her character, but when saying to me you take care of my portray, you ought to not see it as simply an finish and what it should do. That’s the reason I say we’re inefficient and hopeless. On this view, you may’t consider something that will assist me and my portray, and I’ve all the time relied on you pondering of issues, I can’t assist it, I’m no good myself. I sneer at you I feel as a result of you may’t assist me to get any assist or something…and I see myself wasted, I suppose I’m terribly egotistic.

But when she was in some respects an artwork monster, her utter disinterest in public recognition was additionally oddly non-egocentric. Equally, at first look Preece looks as if the extra domineering associate, however on scratching the floor one discovers her devotion to maintaining Hepworth glad and honoring her expertise. Early within the exhibition a placing show of small black-and-white images in a four-by-six grid reveals Hepworth posing by twenty-four of her work, a personal file of her oeuvre archived by her proud associate. From the snap resolution Preece made throughout that first go to to Fry’s home by the writing of A Personal View, which accommodates not the faintest trace of what she and Hepworth actually meant to one another, Preece—clearly a gifted artist of a distinct form—took each alternative to deflect public consideration away from Hepworth. In his biography of Spencer, Pople observes that the 2 ladies “presumably…agreed between them that continuing the subterfuge was the best way to consolidate their mutual future.” Their creative alliance turned a placeholder for the conjugal bond society denied them. It entwined them for all times, as binding as a wedding contract. Even after Preece’s loss of life, Hepworth signed her work together with her associate’s title.

Why did Preece marry Spencer? Neighbors within the small village of Cookham, they grew shut through the years, and it appears seemingly that after the choice introduced itself Preece acknowledged that it may very well be the reply to her and Hepworth’s straitened circumstances. (Even earlier than their marriage, Spencer had signed over the possession of his giant home to Preece.) She might need additionally hoped that it will stem among the gossip about their dwelling preparations. When the ladies initially arrived in Cookham, the proprietor of the primary home they’d hoped to purchase reneged on the sale on the final minute, supposedly as a result of she’d heard rumors that they have been lesbians.

Wilcox cites loads of proof from Preece and Hepworth’s non-public papers testifying to the enduring energy of their attachment (“I want your love so much, there is nothing more,” Preece wrote Hepworth in 1942). But when she was speaking to anybody aside from her beloved, Preece was a grasp dissembler. In A Personal View, Collis summarized her total impression of her topic: “not a woman of very strong personality. Sensitive and highly strung.” Now that evaluation appears solely misjudged. “Who would have imagined that such a married life could be described outside the pages of fiction?” Collis writes within the postscript to the ebook, her consideration solely targeted on Preece’s story about Spencer’s needs for a ménage à trois between him, her, and Hilda. But Collis, it appears, remained oblivious to the triad involving Hepworth, Preece, and Spencer.

In 1978, shortly earlier than her loss of life, Hepworth lastly unburdened herself of her secret. She was visiting School Corridor—the place she’d lodged as a pupil on the Slade—to bequeath the residence corridor her books and prints. Assembly with the principal, Mrs. Witt, she confessed that it was she, not Preece, who’d painted the works offered below her associate’s title. We don’t know why she selected to say so then, nor why to Mrs. Witt, a lady with whom she had no prior relationship.

Solely on the finish of the exhibition will we glimpse Hepworth as she noticed herself. It attracts to an in depth with three self-portraits, the final of which was painted round 1970. A white-haired outdated lady, clad in a portray smock and with brush in hand, she stares immediately forward. There aren’t any different props to mood the scene, no clue at the same time as to the room by which she sits. Mannequin and artist each, now solely alone. Shortly thereafter she wrote in her diary about her grief for the girl with whom she’d shared her life: “I try to struggle against my utter loneliness and loss of her.”