Sheila Legge

Sheila Legge (née Chetwynd Inglis; c. 1911 – 5 January 1949) was a Surrealist performance artist. Legge is best known for her 1936 Trafalgar Square performance for the opening of London International Surrealist Exhibition, posing in a costume inspired by a Salvador Dalí painting, with her head completely obscured by a flower arrangement.

Early life and family Sheila Legge was born Sheila C. Chetwynd Inglis in 1911 at Penzance in Cornwall, the daughter of Lieutenant James Arthur Chetwynd Inglis of the Scottish Highland Light Infantry, 4th Battalion and Ida Evelyn Kerr, a Scot, from Melbourne, Australia. Her father was the only child of Major James Argyll Spalding Inglis,

Early in 1934 at Kensington in London, Legge married her first husband, Rupert Maximilian Faris Legge and gave birth to a son in April of that year. The marriage ended within the year and the couple placed their child to be raised by family friends.

Surrealism In 1935, Legge wrote to David Gascoyne expressing her fondness for his book A Short Survey of Surrealism and offering to help organise a Surrealist group in England. At the time Legge was living in a bedsit in Earl's Court in central London. Gascoyne made arrangements to meet Legge, and later described her as "a warm, good-natured, intelligent, frustrated young woman" with an "eagerness for experience" and "a genuinely keen curiosity" about contemporary culture", "especially surrealism." and Legge is seated in the front row of the group photo of the organisers of the London exhibition. In 1937, Legge participated in the surrealist objects show at the London Gallery, by various art historians who have identified her as a possible lover of David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas and René Magritte. Legge's more noteworthy contribution is undoubtedly her performance as the "Surrealist Phantom" at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, making Legge among the most photographed surrealist artists of all time. while Lodwick was working on his first novel, Running to Paradise, which he dedicated to her when it was published in 1943. By 1945, Legge and Lodwick were living in Cornwall with their two children, with Legge working as a book collector.

Legge died on 5 January 1949 while living at Villa Boramar in Banyuls-sur-Mer in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France and was buried in the Cimetière Communal de Banyuls-sur-Mer there. The cause of death was pleurisy and pneumonia.

The 1936 Man Ray sketch of Legge, entitled "Sheila", was included in an April 1970 exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou entitled The Ballad of The Ladies Out of Time. Up to the publication of this book, nothing was known about Legge, other than her performance at the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

In 2016, a theatre group in New York City included Legge as a character in a play based on parts of Rene Magritte's life, entitled, A Journey Through The Mind Of The Surrealist Painter.