Hamnett, Nina (1890–1956)

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Hamnett, Nina (1890–1956)

British artist of portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and illustrations. Born in Tenby, South Wales, on February 14, 1890; died in 1956; eldest daughter of George (an army officer) and Mary Hamnett; attended boarding school at Portsmouth; attended Dublin School of Art; attended Pelham School of Art, London; attended London School of Art; married Roald Kristian (an artist), on October 12, 1914 (separated, but never divorced); children: one son who died shortly after his birth in 1915.

Selected works:

The Landlady (oil on canvas, 1913); Zadkine (oil on canvas, 1914); Still Life No. 1 (oil on canvas, c. 1915); Der Sturm (oil on canvas, c. 1915); Three Figures in a Cafe (pen and wash, 1916); The Student (oil on canvas, 1917); The Ring Master (oil on canvas, c. 1918); Major General Bethune Lindsay (oil on canvas, 1919); Colliure (oil on canvas, 1921); Gentleman with a Top Hat (oil on canvas, c. 1921); Rupert Doone (oil on canvas, 1922–23); James Hepburn (oil on canvas, 1922); Landscape in Provence (oil on canvas, 1926); A Bench in Regent's Park (watercolor, 1930); Delores (oil on canvas, 1931).

Rebelling against her Victorian upbringing and her family's opposition to her artistic career, Nina Hamnett was one of London's most promising avant-garde painters from 1915 to about 1928. However, her flamboyant personality and bohemian lifestyle, documented in two autobiographies, Laughing Torso (1932) and Is She a Lady? (1955), eventually eclipsed her standing as a significant contributor to the modern art movement.

The eldest daughter of an army officer, Hamnett's schooling and art training were sporadic, interrupted by her father's military postings which took the family from city to city. At the age of 13, she left boarding school to begin art lessons at the School of Art in Portsmouth, where she was excluded from life classes because of her gender. (At the time, Hamnett resorted to taking off her clothes and drawing her reflection in the mirror, a practice that horrified her prudish family.) She attended a year each at the Dublin School of Art and the Pelham School of Art, South Kensington, and then wound up her formal training at the London School of Art under artists Frank Brangwyn, John Swan, and William Nicholson. Hamnett received little encouragement from her family, and at the age of 21, aided financially by her grandmother and two sympathetic aunts, she left home and took a rented room in Bloomsbury, the heart of London's artistic community. She enjoyed a close association with artists Roger Fry, who hired her in 1913 to work in his Omega Workshop, and Walter Sickert, who wrote the preface for her first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings in 1918.

On a trip to Paris in 1914, Hamnett met and fell in love with a struggling Norwegian artist Roald Kristian, whom she convinced to come live with her in London. They were married in October 1914, but Hamnett soon realized that the marriage was a mistake and the two parted. A son born of the union in March 1915 died in infancy, and Hamnett lost contact with Kristian around 1917, when he was arrested as an alien agent and sent to France to fight in the Belgian army. Hamnett never obtained a divorce and remained legally married for the rest of her life. She later had a long-term relationship with Polish artist Waclow Zawadowski (known as "Zawado"), but for the most part she preferred her independence. Monogamy, however, did not preclude a series of lovers and a lifestyle which

gained her the title "Queen of Bohemia." Her social life and drinking absorbed her for a period of ten years beginning in 1932, during which time she virtually abandoned her art. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, Hamnett returned to work, producing some of her most poignant drawings.

Hamnett was fascinated by people, and she is best known for her illuminating portraits, although she also painted still lifes and landscapes. Her work is dominated by a straightforward simplicity and lack of detail, which is particularly apparent in the spatial and volumetric aspects of her still lifes. Influenced strongly by her association with Fry (a champion of Impressionist Paul Cézanne) and the Bloomsbury painters, she liked to paint everyday domestic objects viewed from a slightly tilted perspective, so that the viewer could see the interior space of the object as well as the shape of the outside contours. In her still life Der Sturm, not only does Hamnett incorporate the use of domestic objects in her composition (a two-handled cup and pitcher), but also paints in the foreground a copy of the timely journal Der Sturm, a radical weekly arts magazine published in Berlin which advocated the avant-garde movements in art.

Hamnett's portraits represent the greatest body of her paintings, and include likenesses of some of the better-known personalities in London and Paris between 1910 and 1940: Walter Sickert, Osbert and Edith Sitwell , Ossip Zadkine, Amedeo Modigliani, Frank Dobson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Rupert Doone, Anthony Powell, and Lytton Strachey. In Five Women Painters, authors Teresa Grimes, Judith Collins , and Oriana Baddeley elaborate on the artist's portraits. "Hamnett was gifted with the capacity to grasp the essential in both the form and the character of her sitters," they write, "and to set this down with subtlety and strength. This was helped by the use of a subdued yet quietly rich range of colours, in which she could well have been encouraged by both Sickert and Fry." In a 1928 interview, Hamnett singled out as her best work a commissioned portrait of Major General William Bethune Lindsay, painted in 1919, for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, which was set up to provide a visual record of World War I. Many of Hamnett's portraits, as well as other works, were destroyed in a fire in 1947. Fortunately, she had many of her paintings professionally photographed, and saved the pictures along with her volumes of press-clippings.

Hamnett also explored various areas of English life through her drawings. Whenever an amusing person or social scene captured her attention, she would record it in a deftly-drawn pen or pencil sketch, often as small as two-inches square. Some of her most witty and highly praised line illustrations appeared in Osbert Sitwell's book The People's Album of London Statues (1928). Sickert, who said that Hamnett "drew like a born sculptor," also helped her obtain a part-time job teaching drawing at the Westminster Technical Institute for two terms in the winter of 1919. It was one of only two paying jobs Hamnett ever held, the other being her brief employment with the Omega Workshop. Money always posed a problem for the artist, prompting Basil Bunting to comment: "Nina Hamnett subsists miraculously by rare falls of manna on the stormy coast of Bohemia." Indeed, when the artist died in 1956, after falling from the window of her flat, she was alone and in severe poverty, her reputation as an artist already forgotten.