Isabel Rawsthorne

Isabel Nicholas (10 July 1912 – 27 January 1992), also known at various times as Isabel Delmer, Isabel Lambert, and Isabel Rawsthorne was a British painter, scenery and costume designer, and occasional artists' model. During the Second World War she worked in black propaganda as part of the special operations executive of the British Intelligence. She was part of an artistic bohemian society that included Jacob Epstein, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

Early life and education

Isabel Nicholas was born in the East End of London, the daughter of a master mariner. She was raised in Liverpool and the Wirral. and spent two years in the studio of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Rawsthorne's two years with Epstein and their mutual enthusiasm for Rodin developed her ideas about vitalism and movement, but she never became part of British neo-romanticism. She then moved to Paris, where she continued her studies of the nude at the liberal Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She associated with Giacometti, Tristan Tzara and the Surrealist circle, but was committed to a figurative form of modern art which she called 'Quintessentialism'. She maintained connections to an alternative circle of representational artists including Francis Gruber and Peter Rose Pulham, as well as Balthus and Derain. Her outlook was anti-idealist, intellectual and, like Giacometti, she saw painting from the real world as a challenge that could never be fully met. Later she became interested in natural history and new ideas in Anthropology, Ecology and Ethology, such as those of her friends Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. These inform the skeletal bird, fish and bat figures of her 1949 Hanover Gallery show, the haunting ape series, and her last, large Migration pictures.

During the Italian Campaign, she edited the magazine Il Mondo Libero.

In the 1950s and '60s, her explorations of the embattled origins of art and life were adapted into designs for the ballet and opera, such as a Minoan Tiresias created for the ballet. An opera of the same name premiered in 1951 at Covent Garden, featuring the last work of her husband Constant Lambert. These works returned to the matière relief effects of the early 1950s and exchanged ideas with Bacon and the sculptor Roy Noakes. Some of these new works and a selection of her innovative dancers were presented to the public at the Marlborough Gallery in 1968.

The last of her series of paintings based on the Essex countryside, Migrations, embedded bird and animal motifs in timeless settings. Swathes of yellow evoke the deserts of pre-history and post-history, as well as the very immediate issue of the fields of oil seed rape that were appearing in the 1970s.

In later life, widely read biographies of Giacometti and Bacon brought Rawsthorne fame as a model and muse, but unfortunately had the effect of obscuring her main profession. and retrospectives have been exhibited. It is believed that Rawsthorne's last work was Sparrowhawk, which was found on her easel after her death.

Exhibitions Isabel Nicholas: Animal Studies, Arnold Haskell's Valenza Gallery, London, 1933 Watercolours by Paul Nash, Frank Dobson, P.H. Jowett, Adrian Allinson, Isabel Nicholas, Redfern Gallery, London, 1934 Isabel Lambert: Recent Paintings, Hanover Gallery, London, 1949 London-Paris (New Trends in Paintings and Sculpture), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1950, 1955 Isabel Lambert, Michael Ayrton, Milan, 1950 Exhibition of Drawings, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1951 Recent Trends in Realist Painting, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1952 Exhibition of Paintings, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1954 Contemporary English Theatre Design, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1957 Isabel Lambert - Recent Paintings, Hanover Gallery, London, 1959 Three Stage Designers: Leslie Hurry, Isabel Lambert, Sophie Fedorovitch, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1963/64 Dancers of the Royal Ballet: An Exhibition of Drawings and Gouaches by Isabel Lambert, Mermaid Theatre, London, 1966, Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge, 1967 Isabel Lambert, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1968 Isabel Lambert: Exhibition of Work, Framlingham Art Gallery, Suffolk, 1974 Isabel Lambert: Dancers in Action. Drawings, paintings, stage designs, October Gallery, London, 1986 Exhibition of work, Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, 1990 Isabel Rawsthorne 1912–1992 A Memorial Retrospective, Woods Gallery, Leicester, 1992 Isabel Rawsthorne 1912–1992 Paintings, Drawings and Designs, Mercer Art Gallery/October Gallery 1997-98 Isabel Rawsthorne: Natural History, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 1998–1999 Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties, Barbican Art Gallery, 2002 Epstein and Isabel: Artist and Muse, Harewood House, 2008. Friends and Lovers, Number 3, The Old Workhouse, Pateley Bridge, 2008-9 Alberto Giacometti "Die Frau auf dem Wagen" Triumph und Tod, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 2010 Migration, The Old Workhouse, Pateley Bridge, 2010 Isabel Rawsthorne: Moving Bodies, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2012 Alberto Giacometti and Isabel Rawsthorne, a Conversation, Tate Britain, 2022 The Many Sides of Isabel Rawsthorne: the story of a local and international artist, Fry Art Gallery, 2022

Theatre design Tiresias, Sadler's Wells Ballet, 1951 Elektra, Sadler's Wells Opera, 1953 Blood Wedding, Sadler's Wells Ballet, 1953 Coppélia, Sadler's Wells Ballet, 1953 Life's a Dream, The Group Theatre, 1953 Madame Chrysanthème, Sadler's Wells Ballet, 1955 Jabez and the Devil, The Royal Ballet, 1961

Personal life She was the mother of Epstein's son Jackie (born 1934), and briefly assumed the name "Margaret Epstein" (the name of Epstein's wife) in order to register Jackie's birth.

Rawsthorne's first show was a sell-out, and, by September 1934, she was living in Paris. She worked with André Derain, and lived and travelled for a time with Balthus and his wife. She was painted several times by Derain and Pablo Picasso. In 1936, she married her first husband, the foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, Sefton Delmer.

The onset of World War II forced Rawsthorne to leave Paris. She relinquished at least one ticket out and did not flee until the day the Germans arrived on 14 June 1940.

She remained with Delmer for the first part of the war, but they later divorced in 1947. She maintained indirect links with France by working in intelligence and black propaganda for the Political Warfare Executive.

Around 1943, she encountered Francis Bacon within the arty set around the BBC, although they probably did not become intimate until a few years later. Rawsthorne's closest wartime friends appear to have been John Rayner (typographer, journalist and soldier (SOE), the photographer Joan Leigh Fermor (then Rayner), the Schiaparelli model Anna Phillips, and the composer Elisabeth Lutyens, but her social life encompassed many others including the poets Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (she shared working quarters with Thomas), Ian Fleming, and old friends from Paris, Peter Rose Pulham, Peter Watson (editor of the journal Horizon) and the spy Donald Maclean.

Returning to Paris in 1945, Rawsthorne was re-united with Giacometti and lived with him for a short while, but they never married. She continued to be involved in the evolution of the figurative style associated with Existentialism. She socialised with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl and other intellectuals, and for a time lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the journal Les Temps Modernes. She also entertained the philosopher A. J. Ayer in Paris, saw Eduardo Paolozzi and Bacon, and had relationships with Georges Bataille and the composer René Leibowitz. In the winter of 1946/47 she withdrew to modest lodgings in the Indre to work alone. The composer Constant Lambert visited her in 1947 and they married later that year.

Following her second marriage, her base became London. Her art world associates, including Bacon and Lucian Freud, created a potent mix with a glitzier musical set, including the Sitwells, Lutyens, Frederick Ashton, Margot Fonteyn and Alan Rawsthorne.

Lambert died in 1951 and Rawsthorne returned to Paris to paint. She continued to see Giacometti, but eventually married Alan Rawsthorne in 1951. They moved to a thatched cottage in rural Essex with a purpose built studio, near friends such as the politician Tom Driberg, poet Randall Swingler, artists Michael Ayrton and Biddy and Roy Noakes; Bacon had a house not far away. Six of Bacon's portraits of Rawsthorne were shown in his 1967 show, including Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne. In all, between 1964 and 1970 he painted 14 images of her, including five triptychs. Giacometti died in 1966, Alan Rawsthorne in 1971, and Isabel Rawsthorne in 1992; Bacon outlived her by a few months. Apart from visits to London and Paris, Africa, Greece and Australia, and a short period in Cambridge (1972-3), she lived in the cottage for forty years - half of her life. She raised geese, a nod to her interest in Konrad Lorenz, and became involved in the emergent environmentalist movement. She and her last husband are buried in Thaxted churchyard.