Nina Hamnett

Nina Hamnett (14 February 1890 – 16 December 1956) was a Welsh artist and writer, and an expert on sailors' shanties, who became known as the Queen of Bohemia.

Early life Hamnett was born in the small coastal town of Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales, eldest of the four children of George Edward Hamnett (born 1864), a captain in the Royal Army Service Corps, and Mary Elizabeth De Blois (1863/4-1947), daughter of Captain William Edwin Archdeacon, a Royal Navy officer and cartographer. Hamnett was sent to a private boarding school at Westgate-on-Sea before moving on, aged 12, to the Royal School for Daughters of Officers of the Army in Bath, Somerset, from 1902 to 1905. Her father, having been dishonourably discharged from the army, took work as a taxi driver. Her education had to be funded by her aunts and by a loan against a future bequest. From 1906 to 1907 she studied at the Pelham Art School and then at the London School of Art until 1910. In 1914 she went to Montparnasse, Paris, to study at Marie Vassilieff's Academy.

While studying in London, she met and posed for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who sculpted a series of nude bronzes. During this period she became friendly with Olivia Shakespear and Ezra Pound. She went on to have a love affair with Brzeska, and later with Amedeo Modigliani and Roger Fry. In 1916 her husband was deported as an unregistered alien.

Her work was well regarded by Walter Sickert, who endeavoured to advise her on her painting, but she lacked his dedication and revelled in not taking advice. Sickert used her as a model, and also painted her with her husband in 1915–16 in The Little Tea Party: Nina Hamnett and Roald Kristian.

Her artistic creations were widely exhibited during World War I, including at the Royal Academy in London as well as the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Back in England, she taught at the Westminster Technical Institute from 1917 to 1918. The notorious occultist Aleister Crowley unsuccessfully sued her and the publisher for libel over allegations of black magic made in her book.

Hamnett died in 1956 from complications after falling out of her apartment window and being impaled on the fence forty feet below. Her last words were "Why don't they let me die?"

The American novelist Julius Horwitz (1920–1986) portrayed Hamnett in his 1964 novel about London during World War Two, titled Can I Get There By Candlelight. Horwitz was stationed outside London during World War Two, and was befriended by Hamnett as a young soldier when he would go into London on a three-day pass. A biography, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia by Denise Hooker, was published in 1986. In 2011, Hamnett was the subject of a short film by writer/director Chris Ward— What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor, starring Siobhan Fahey. In November 2019, the Fitzrovia Chapel hosted an exhibition called Nina Hamnett – Everybody was Furious.