Euphemia Lamb

Euphemia Lamb

Euphemia by Ambrose McEvoy, oil on canvas, 1909, Tate Gallery.
Born Nina Forrest
c. 1889[1]
Died 1957[1]
Nationality English
Known for Artist's model
Saint Euphemia, Andrea Mantegna, tempera on canvas, 1454

Euphemia Lamb (c.1889–1957),[1] born Nina Forrest,[2] was an artists' model and the wife of Henry Lamb. She modelled for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein and came to exemplify the sexual freedom of the bohemian lifestyle of the early twentieth century.[1] Henry Lamb renamed her Euphemia, by which name she was generally known. John Maynard Keynes commented that Euphemia had more of a sex life "than the rest of us put together".[3] She was one of the lovers of the occultist Aleister Crowley.[4]

Early life

Nina's father was Arthur Forrest. Nina claimed that she was born on a steamship bound for Bombay, but there is no independent verification of this. She was raised in Greenheys, a poor district of Manchester known as a centre for prostitution.[1] Her working class accent, however, was not to everyone's taste, and Viva King, another Bohemian, said of one of Jacob Epstein's busts of Euphemia, "I fancy I can hear, through the open mouth, her ugly voice".[5]

Henry Lamb

Nina Forrest met Henry Lamb in 1905 in Manchester, where he was at medical school. They left for London as soon as they could. Henry enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and they attended the Friday Club run by Vanessa Stephen.[1] Supposedly, Henry renamed Nina ″Euphemia″ because she reminded him of Saint Euphemia in the painting by Andrea Mantegna[2] They married in May 1906[6] after she became pregnant, but she lost the baby due to a miscarriage.[1]

Artists' model

Euphemia was one of the models who networked at the Café Royal before the First World War, occupying a grey area between professional model and prostitute.[5] Her contemporaries included Betty May, Dolores, and Lilian Shelley, along with many other young women.[7][8] She was slim, pale, and fair-haired and apparently able to adopt any pose that might be asked of her.[1] Her husky voice and slightly androgynous appearance meant that she could pass for a young man, which she sometimes did. Augustus John commented to Henry Lamb, "she makes an irresistible boy".[3]

Augustus John

In March 1907, Euphemia and Henry Lamb went to Paris to stay with Augustus John and Dorelia McNeill at Montparnasse.[1][9] Henry became John's pupil and Euphemia his model. John was fascinated by Euphemia's appearance and her sexual behaviour, and he nicknamed her "Lobelia", a name he used quite openly with her husband.[10] Dorelia became romantically interested in Henry, which John encouraged so that he could spend more time with Euphemia,[11] though he denied any personal romantic interest in her.[12]

Although John prized Euphemia as a model, he did not take her seriously otherwise, regarding her behaviour as quite eccentric[3] and her stories fanciful. On one occasion, according to Euphemia, her penchant for dressing like a man had unfortunate consequences, she and John were arrested as homosexuals and she was required to undress in custody in order to prove she was a woman.[3][11] She also claimed that she had a revolver and was prepared to shoot herself and her husband, and that she had caused the death of John's first wife Ida who had died in childbirth.[3]

Battles with Henry forced Euphemia in the direction of Duncan Grant,[1] whose relationships were usually homosexual, but he was repulsed by the complicated love life of the group, particularly John's encouragement of Dorelia's relationship with Henry, writing to Lytton Strachey, "That Lamb family sickens me", and referring to Euphemia as "the white haired whore".[3] By the summer of 1907, Euphemia had effectively left Henry, although they did not divorce until 1928 when Henry wished to marry Pansy Pakenham.[13]

John continued to follow Euphemia's liaisons with interest, reporting to Henry in August that Euphemia had "made the acquaintance of a number of nations" and the following year to Dorelia that "Lobelia had 6 men in her room last night, representing the six European powers".[3]

Jacob Epstein

Jacob Epstein's 1908 (or 1911) bust of Euphemia Lamb, John Quinn collection

The sculptor Jacob Epstein created a number of busts of Euphemia in marble and bronze, the best known of which is the bronze bust in the Tate Gallery which the gallery dates to 1908,[14] but which Epstein dated to 1911 in Let There Be Sculpture.[15] Three studies of Euphemia are in the Leeds City Art Gallery.[11]

Around 1910, Epstein completed for Lady Ottoline Morrell a garden figure of 53 inches (1,300 mm) for which Euphemia was the model. A plaster model of the work was exhibited in 1911 and a bronze of the torso completed in 1912.[14]

Aleister Crowley

In Paris, Euphemia became the lover of the occultist Aleister Crowley; in 1908 they conspired to humiliate Crowley's male lover and acolyte Victor Neuburg by convincing him that Euphemia was in love with him while Crowley pressed him into visiting a brothel, thus making him unfaithful to her.[4][16] Crowley gave Euphemia the name "Dorothy" in his Confessions[3] and described her as "incomparably beautiful ... capable of stimulating the greatest extravagances of passion".[17]

James Dickson Innes

In 1910, Euphemia met James Dickson Innes (1887–1914) at a cafe on the Boulevard du Montparnasse,[18] and the two began an affair which was more intense for Innes than for Euphemia who never restricted her relationships to just one man.[12] According to Euphemia, they travelled through southern France together. Innes was already suffering from the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. In 1910 or 1911, with Augustus John, he established a small artistic commune at Nant Ddu cottage in north Wales. Visitors included John and Dorelia, Derwent Lees, Ian Strang, and Euphemia, who Innes painted against the background of Arenig Fawr. It was said that when the relationship was over, Innes buried a silver casket of love letters from Euphemia on the summit of Arenig, the mountain in some way representing the scale of Innes' unrequited love for her.[19][20][21]

  1. ^ Girl Standing by a Lake. National Museum of Wales. Retrieved 30 October 2014.

Affairs

Among Euphemia's other lovers were the poet Francis Macnamara and the author Henri-Pierre Roché.[22]

Later life

Little is recorded about Euphemia's later life. In 1934,[23] she married the painter Edward Grove, but they divorced in 1942[1] or 1943.[14] Euphemia died in 1957.[1]

Notes and references

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 Berk Jiminez, Jill (2013). Dictionary of Artists' Models. New York & Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 311–312. ISBN 978-1-135-95914-2.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Euphemia Lamb, 1908. Tate. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Holroyd, Michael. (1997). Augustus John. London: Vintage. pp. 248–250. ISBN 0099333015.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Churton, Tobias (2011). Aleister Crowley: the Biography: Spiritual Revolutionary, Romantic Explorer, Occult Master and Spy. London: Watkins Publishing. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-78028-012-7.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gardiner, Stephen. (1993) Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment. London: Flamingo, p. 74. ISBN 000654598X
  6. ↑ "England & Wales marriages 1837–2008 Transcription", findmypast. Retrieved 28 October 2014. (subscription required)
  7. ↑ May, Betty. (1929) Tiger Woman: My Story. (2014 reprint) London: Duckworth, p. 72. ISBN 978-0715648551
  8. ↑ Nicholson, Virginia. (2002). Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939. London: Viking. p. 270. ISBN 0670889660.
  9. ↑ They had visited the previous year, too, before they were married. Spalding, Frances. (1998). Duncan Grant. London: Pimlico. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-4090-2938-0.
  10. ↑ Lot 52. Bonhams. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Cawthorne, Nigel. (2004) Sex Lives of the Great Artists. London: Prion, p. 175. ISBN 1853755443
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Hoole, John & Margaret Simons (2013) James Dickson Innes (1887-1914). London: Lund Humphries, pp. 67–68. ISBN 1848221390
  13. ↑ Lamb, Henry Taylor. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edition. Retrieved 29 October 2014.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 N03187 EUPHEMIA LAMB 1908. Tate. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  15. ↑ Epstein, Jacob. (1940) Let There Be Sculpture. New York: Putnam, pp. 355–356.
  16. ↑ Lachman, Gary (2014). Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World. New York: Penguin Group USA. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-698-14653-2.
  17. ↑ Crowley, Aleister. (1989) The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An autohagiography. Corrected edition. Edited by John Symonds & Kenneth Grant. London: Arkana, Penguin Books, pp. 574-576. ISBN 0140191895
  18. ↑ Holroyd, 1997, p. 352.
  19. ↑ Chilvers, Ian; John Glaves-Smith. (2009). A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 816. ISBN 978-0-19-923965-8.
  20. ↑ "Camden Town Group" Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  21. ↑ Holroyd, 1997, p. 354.
  22. ↑ Henri Pierre Roché: An Inventory of His Papers in the Carlton Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Texas Archival Resources Online. Retrieved 29 October 2014.
  23. ↑ "England & Wales marriages 1837–2008 Transcription", findmypast. Retrieved 31 October 2014. (subscription required)

External links

Media related to Euphemia Lamb at Wikimedia Commons