Kate Lechmere

Lechmere was the model for Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair, Wyndham Lewis, 1912. Kate Elizabeth Lechmere (13 October 1887 – February 1976) was a British painter who with Wyndham Lewis was the co-founder of the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. As far as is known, none of Lechmere's paintings have survived. She served as a nurse in England during the First World War and had a three-year relationship with the poet and critic T. E. Hulme before he was killed. After the war she became a successful milliner.

Early life Lechmere was born in Fownhope, Herefordshire. Her father was Arthur Lechmere, a farmer, and her mother was Alice Lechmere. Kate had two brothers, Arthur and Herbert. The family lived at Bowens, Highland Place, Fownhope, at the time of the 1891 British census and were wealthy enough to employ a nurse and a cook who both lived in. Kate Lechmere was educated at Clifton College. She studied at the Atelier La Palette, Paris, and later under Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art. She was close to Lawrence Atkinson with whom she had studied the piano in Normandy.

Meets Wyndham Lewis Lechmere wrote that she first met Wyndham Lewis in 1912, though according to Paul O'Keeffe it was late 1910 or early 1911. They went to dinner during which Lewis barely spoke, which was not unusual, Rebecca West had the same treatment. Afterwards, Lewis revealed that he had received troubling news. His lover Olive Johnson (19 or 20 years old) had become pregnant by him. and The Laughing Woman, both 1912. In a 1914 interview he commented on the slightly grotesque face of the former, "Although the forms of the figure and head perhaps look rather unlikely to you, they are more or less accurate, as representation. It was done from life".

The Rebel Art Centre

About January 1914, Lechmere wrote to Wyndham Lewis from France suggesting that they set up a "modern art Studio in London, run on much the same lines as those in Paris". She lived in a small flat at the top of the building. She did not sign the Vorticist manifesto. In a description that could have been of Lewis, Jacob Epstein, who was otherwise full of praise for Hulme, described him as "large and somewhat abrupt in manner. He had the reputation of being a bully and arrogant because of this abruptness." Hulme "excluded women for the most part from his evenings, as he said the sex element interfered with intellectual talk – a confession of his own weakness."

Hulme was a clear rival to Lewis for Lechmere's affections. In addition, he was not deferential like some in Lewis's circle, and praised Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg above Lewis's own work. Lewis saw Hulme as Epstein's man, and lectured Lechmere that "Hulme was Epstein and Epstein was Hulme." but now relations soured. A paranoid and insecure Lewis was afraid that he would lose Lechmere and her financial support, and be replaced at the Centre by Hulme or Epstein. He was right about the first two only. There was no conspiracy to replace him. He took to pacing up and down and calling Lechmere a "bloody bitch," which she chose to ignore. both of whom signed the manifesto in BLAST. Lechmere later dismissively described Dismorr and Saunders, who were both Lewis's lovers, as "little lap dogs who wanted to be Lewis's slaves and do everything for him". They signed off their letters as "K.D.", a reference to the brass knuckleduster made for Hulme by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, one of a number of similar small items Gaudier-Brzeska made for his friends. The fact that Hulme always carried it was later used to portray him as a man with a high potential for violence but the item was actually a sex toy that Lechmere and Hulme used in their love making. According to Lechmere, the holes in the knuckleduster had sexual and other symbolism for Hulme.

Hulme wrote to Lechmere, "The man I relieved was killed by a shell, but I don't think that's at all likely to happen to me," but soon enough he too was blown apart by an artillery shell on September 28, 1917. Kibblewhite hosted an important artistic and literary salon at her home in Frith Street, London, where Hulme had the use of a room as a study. Hulme spent the summers with Kibblewhite and her children (she was separated from her husband) as a family, even though he had said that he could not marry her, even if she divorced, for religious reasons. Hulme was careful to keep the two women apart, and Kibblewhite was not aware of Lechmere.

Post-war After the war, Lechmere became a milliner, trading as Rigolo and with a workshop in Knightsbridge. She made a dress for Vanessa Bell

By the 1950s, Lechmere was retired and living at 29 Oakley Gardens, Chelsea, where she took in lodgers. She was consulted as a "living witness" to Vorticism, and her obituary in The Times concluded: "To those students of the Modern Movement who sought her out, she was a charming and interested friend. That lively intelligence which was her passport in the man's world of pre-war London was still very much in evidence in her final years."

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