Nina Hamnett

A trio of Nina Hamnett’s early still lifes depicting close-cropped interior scenes gives a glimpse of the artist’s rented rooms in Fitzrovia, the bohemian London district to which she returned in 1914 following a year in Paris. Rejecting the conventional, Hamnett was also entering a period of productivity: working by day at Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, she spent her free hours painting, or sketching in pubs in the company of artists, lovers and friends.

Still Life 1914–15 depicts a glass of wine on a tabletop, beside two books. Something of the painting’s simplicity renders it a little strange: the vessel seems to hover; the liquid is milky. The books are reduced to almost abstract elements. Though Hamnett took lessons in still life from her tutor at the London School of Art, William Nicholson, she tended to disregard his instruction. The painting might be compared with Gwen John’s The Brown Tea Pot 1915–16 (both painters came from Tenby, south-west Wales), and yet John’s still life is closer to those painted by Nicholson, with its blurred edges and luminosity. Hamnett’s is characterised by something more austere, a certain severity of line and shape.

Austerity and severity are the terms with which Hamnett’s work is often described, but on looking closely at this small painting, I notice it softening. The palette is grubby but warm, the greys and browns tempered with pink and enlivened by an area of deep eggshell. The liquid in the wine glass is thickened with white and lemon yellow so that it is almost creamy, and the vessel’s shadow, splintering from its base, falls across the tabletop like one cast by a tree on a lawn. Now that I see this, the edges of the shadow blur and it won’t keep still, as if possessing a threshing, pastoral energy. The painting’s surface is lightly textured, and glows. Such understated lustre is present in her other still lifes: the gently reflective surface of the stovepipe in Still Life (Blue Stove) c.1915; the glossy chestnut tabletop of Der Sturm c.1915, on which are arranged books, a newspaper, a carton, an angular white jug and a two-handled cup. From first impressions of Hamnett’s modest environment, a painter’s secret life emerges. These still lifes speak of sureness and self-possession; in the last, a reddish-brown paint dribble near the bottom-right corner suggests a supressed vitality.

Two London pictures situate Hamnett in proximity to the Camden Town Group (she was later taught by Walter Sickert, whose lessons she also ignored), while showing her affinities with the European avant-garde and post-impressionism. Back Garden Camden Town c.1918 shows a winter garden, perhaps an orchard, studded with leafless trees. Beyond the wall, the building’s terracotta surface seems to hold residual heat, and the ground – patchy, muddy, though with some vegetation – is rendered in thin downward strokes of liquid pigment: olive green, moss, lavender. (Hamnett’s London stretched between Camden and Fitzrovia; she walked between the two neighbourhoods to save on the bus fare). Roofs Fitzroy Street 1916–18 is characterised by a close gathering of angles, much like the jaunty planes and volumes of the still lifes. The planes of everything in the painting – rooflines and chimney pots – pleasingly and neatly relate, like the creases that remain on a once-folded piece of paper.

But Hamnett’s greatest interest as a painter lay elsewhere. ‘My ambition’, she assured a critic in 1924, ‘is to paint psychological portraits that shall accurately represent the spirit of the age.’ There are eight portraits on display at Tate Britain, each revealing the artist’s ability to capture something of her subject’s intensity and interiority. Portrait of Edward Wolfe 1918 depicts a youthful man (newly arrived in London, Hamnett encouraged Wolfe, a South African actor, to apply to the Omega Workshops, where she was working) with gently sloping shoulders, hair feathered delicately on his forehead, his posture vulnerable, his expression hopeful. Next to him, the subject of Portrait of Louis McQuilland 1915 is dandyish in profile, his shining helmet of hair atop a sharp collar and descending expanse of suit, the fabric textured, glossy, the colour of blackberries. McQuilland appears mountainous, also weathered and worn out. The shadows on his face are angular (cheekbone, hairline and collar another close collection of angles), the backdrop rosy, as if Hamnett has painted him at dawn after a night of revels. The two men might represent two versions of masculinity, though neither is conventional, and both remain absorbed in private thought, distant and unknowable.

The portraits suggest the spaces in which Hamnett moved and the relationships she forged with people who, like her, existed on the periphery. A Gentleman with a Top Hat (George Manuel Unwin Esq) 1921 depicts another dandy she met in a Paris café, the expression behind his monocle defensive. (The sitter told Hamnett that those were the only clothes he owned). In the extraordinary painting The Landlady 1918, the proprietor of Hamnett’s lodgings in Bath is shown with a frilled collar, the epitome of gentility, though her expression is nothing less than shrewd.

Hamnett’s summer in Bath in 1918, embarked upon at Sickert’s urging, was dispiriting: she needed the late-night cafés and pubs of Paris and London. Though her work was admired by her contemporaries, after 1928, she largely stopped painting. There were hardships in Hamnett’s later years. Penurious, she sold sketches and stories for drinks, and died in 1956, having fallen from the window of her small room on Westbourne Terrace. (Lucian Freud, who liked her painting, claimed to have been at her deathbed). She can often be sighted in diaries and memoirs of the period. She did, in fact, set her own life down on the page, publishing two volumes of autobiography. In these, she is painter, muse, bohemian, raconteur and much given to embellishment, raucously presiding over her own story.

^{A new free display of work by Nina Hamnett runs until 23 May 2027. The Landlady was purchased with funds provided by Charles Booth-Clibborn, Nicholas Themans Trust, and Evelyn, Lady Downshire’s Fund in 2025. A Gentleman with a Top Hat (George Manuel Unwin Esq) was lent from a private collection in 2021.}

^{Harriet Baker is a writer and critic based in London. Her book Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehman is published by Allen Lane}