Isabel Rawsthorne - Life

Life

The life which became famous for its love affairs with extraordinary artists was governed by a love affair with art itself. Born Isabel Nicholas, the daughter of a master mariner, in the East End of London, Isabel was raised in Liverpool. She studied at the Liverpool College of Art, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London and spent two years in the studio of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Isabel's first show was a sell-out and by September 1934 she was living in Paris. She worked with André Derain and lived and travelled for a time with Balthus and his wife. She was painted several times by Derain and Pablo Picasso. In 1936 Isabel married her first husband, foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, Sefton Delmer. The travel, parties and luxurious apartment in the Place Vendôme, never replaced her Left Bank life, however; and most days she made the long walk there and back. A lifelong Socialist, Isabel visited Spain while Delmer was reporting the Spanish Civil War.

Isabel was at the heart of the Paris avant-garde and became involved with Alberto Giacometti. They shared many intellectual enthusiasms and a commitment to a modern form of representational painting. Isabel's characteristically astonished gaze and defiant stance can be seen in the new kind of etiolated figure that Giacometti developed over the next decade. The onset of World War II forced Isabel to leave Paris. She relinquished at least one ticket out and did not flee until the day the Germans arrived, 14 June 1940.

Isabel remained with Delmer for the first part of the war, but they eventually divorced. She maintained indirect links with France by working in intelligence and black propaganda for the Political Warfare Executive. During the Italian Campaign, she edited the magazine Il Mondo Libero. About this time, 1943–44, she encountered Francis Bacon within the arty set around the BBC, although they probably did not become intimate until a few years later. Isabel's closest wartime friends appear to have been John Rayner (typographer, journalist and soldier( SOE), the photographer Joan Leigh Fermor (then Rayner), the Schiaparelli model, Anna Phillips, and the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, but her romantic and social life encompassed many others including the poets Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas (with whom she shared working quarters), Ian Fleming and old friends from Paris, Peter Rose-Pulham, Peter Watson (editor of the journal Horizon) and the spy Donald Maclean

Returning to Paris in 1945, Isabel was re-united with Giacometti and lived with him for a short while, but they never married. She continued to be involved in the evolution of the figurative style associated with Existentialism. She socialised with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl, etc., and for a time lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the journal Les Temps Modernes. She also entertained the philosopher A J Ayer in Paris, and saw Eduardo Paolozzi and Bacon. There were relationships with Georges Bataille and the composer René Leibowitz, but in the winter of 1946/7 she withdrew to modest lodgings in the Indre to work alone. The composer and ‘English Diaghilev’ Constant Lambert visited her in 1947 and they married later that year.

Following her second marriage Isabel's base became London. Her arty associates, including Bacon and Lucian Freud, created a potent mix with a glitzier musical set, the Sitwells, Lutyens, Frederick Ashton, Margot Fonteyn, Alan Rawsthorne et al. According to Norman Lebrecht, she "matched her husbands for drink, swore like a navvy and was a fine painter besides". From 1949, she and Bacon showcased their figurative brand of modern art at the Hanover Gallery and she exhibited in group shows organised by the ICA and the British Council. She began her career as a designer for the Royal Ballet and the opera at the Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells.

Lambert died in 1951 and Isabel returned to Paris to paint. She continued to see Giacometti, but eventually settled with Alan Rawsthorne. They moved to a thatched cottage in rural Essex with a purpose built studio, near friends such as the politician Tom Driberg, poet Randall Swingler, artists Michael Ayrton and Biddy and Roy Noakes; Bacon had a house not far away. Giacometti died in 1966 and Rawsthorne in 1971; Bacon outlived Isabel by a few months. Apart from visits to London and Paris, Africa, Greece and Australia, and a short period in Cambridge (1972-3), Isabel lived in the cottage for forty years - half of her life. She raised geese, a nod to her interest in Konrad Lorenz, and became involved in the emergent environmentalist movement. She and her last husband are buried in Thaxted churchyard