Hermione Eyre

Nina Hamnett’s art was every bit as riveting as her life

The work of this famously witty memoirist and 'Queen of Bohemia' has long been overshadowed by her hedonism, but that is changing

The circus paintings are thick with menace: ‘The Ring Master’, c.1918, by Nina Hamnett. Credit: Bridgeman Images 
issue 26 June 2021

Nina Hamnett is in vogue again. She is the subject of a new pocket biography, no. 7 in Eiderdown Books’s Modern Women Artists series, and her first ever retrospective is now open at Charleston Farmhouse’s gallery space. I confess I didn’t know much about her before this resurrection, but she is now one of my favourite 20th-century artists.

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