Exhibition of the week: Nina Hamnett at Charleston

Bringing together some 30 paintings, the show reclaims Hamnett as ‘an artist to be reckoned with in her own right’

Nina Hamnett's work
Nina Hamnett, The Landlady, 1918
(Image credit: Bridgeman Images)

The painter Nina Hamnett was a “famously flamboyant figure”, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. A fixture of the Paris and London avant-garde whose beauty and total lack of inhibition earned her the unofficial title of “queen of bohemia”, she modelled for Walter Sickert; ate caviar with Stravinsky; entranced James Joyce (who described her as “one of the few vital women that he had ever met”); and counted Roger Fry, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Amedeo Modigliani among her lovers.

Hamnett was a“magnet for scandal”. She “boasted of having the best breasts in all of Europe”; she took lovers of both sexes, but particularly liked boxers and sailors who would “go away” afterwards.

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