A Queer Tale of Deception

Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story, an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film. 

And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art. 

The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot....  

The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took examples of both their work to show to Roger Fry, the influential critic and promoter of modern art, and a member of the Bloomsbury group. Fry liked one set of paintings -- Hepworth's -- but he mistakenly assumed they were by Preece. Patricia did not correct him.

Back at the studio, Preece told Hepworth what had happened. So a scheme was conceived under which Hepworth would paint pictures that she would sign with Preece's name, for marketing purposes as it were. And this arrangement would continue for decades, Hepworth subordinating her artistic talent to Preece's larger personality, it would seem. To be clear, there's no suggestion of any coercion in this; Hepworth appears to have agreed that this collaboration was the way forward for them as a couple. 

The first Preece/Hepworth painting you see tends to prove the point. The Girl in Blue was bought by no less an artistic big beast than Augustus John. 

There's a black-and-white photograph of Hepworth sitting in the garden with her hand on this painting; Preece took a photographic record of Hepworth's output, and there are 20 little prints on a wall here showing various pictures. Dorothy often appears rather unsmiling in them, it has to be said. In one photo, the painting is incongruously propped up against one of those galvanised-steel garden-waste incinerators. 

Fry advised the couple to go to Paris, to study the latest trends in art, and they stayed there for four years. "Modern painting extraordinary," Hepworth wrote to her mother. And for a lesbian couple, the French capital offered a rather more easy-going way of life and atmosphere than stuffy old Britain. Even though Britain wasn't short of artists with unconventional lifestyles themselves....

Now, we can't tell whether Preece was any good as an artist or not; only one drawing by her is known to survive; from her time at the Slade, it's in this show, but it's not much to go on. What was her role in all this, apart from representing the couple to the outside world? She arranged sitters, it seems, helped with the choice of motifs for the still lifes (a lot of Cezanne influence at work), dealt with the outside world in general. The paintings displayed in this show are attributed to the couple together, though usually with a separate line on the caption reading "Painted by Dorothy Hepworth".

Others in the Bloomsbury circle offered support, including Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Woolf proposed that Preece should paint a portrait of the trailblazing composer Ethel Smyth, but the conspirators had to turn down such a promising commission; Hepworth couldn't be seen to paint in public or the truth would come out. Once they'd started on their deception, they had to continue with it. Oh, what a tangled web we weave....

By the late 1930s, the artist assumed to be Preece was being celebrated with two large and successful solo exhibitions in London. Duncan Grant wrote the preface to the catalogue in 1936, talking of her "remarkable gifts" and "intensely personal vision". In 1938, Clive Bell wrote that Preece's "pictures are obstinately sincere" and that "for no consideration.... would she tamper with facts as she sees them." Stanley Spencer bought The Green Divan, regarded as the star painting from the 1936 show. 

Let's tangle that web a bit more, shall we?

In 1927, Hepworth and Preece had moved to Cookham in Berkshire, where Spencer lived, buying a thatched cottage, Moor Thatch. But the Wall Street crash of 1929 hit their income badly. Preece began modelling for Spencer soon after they met, and the earnings from that helped pay the mortgage. 

Spencer, already married to Hilda Carline, became besotted with Preece, although we don't really get very deeply into that side of the story in this exhibition. He divorced Hilda in 1937 and married Patricia a week later. There's a photo of the wedding party in this show, and, apart from Stanley's absolutely dreadful hat, what catches the eye is Dorothy standing slightly aside to the left, looking somewhat disgusted by the entire proceedings. But in another twist, Stanley didn't go off to Cornwall for the honeymoon with Patricia, Dorothy did. In fact, Patricia never slept with Stanley at all, and the marriage quickly collapsed, though she refused to divorce him. 

Rather oddly, the curators describe Spencer's pictures of Preece as making her appear "compliant"; that's not the impression we've tended to get. 

The other Spencer painting here is the memorable Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill, with her head seen from the side at the foot of a flower- and bush-strewn hill, a wedding ring already on her finger foreshadowing their marriage. (You don't get to see the nudes: Patricia with pendulous breasts from the Ferens in Hull, Stanley's self-portrait with her from the Fitzwilliam, nor the frightening leg-of-mutton nude in which he crouches over her -- copyright restrictions apply, but you can Google it!)

From 1927 onwards, Hepworth mainly painted interiors and portraits of the residents of Cookham. And that makes it hard to understand how they were able to carry on the deception. Were the good people of the village sworn to secrecy? Surely someone must have blurted out at some point that it wasn't Miss Preece (or the new Mrs Spencer) who did the paintings, it was her friend, the quiet Miss Hepworth. Stanley, by the way, did say he'd never seen Patricia pick up a paintbrush. 

We enjoyed these pictures; they're very understated and rather warm.

We weren't so taken with Hepworth's own nudes, which also seem to have made up a fair part of her output. 

Preece died in 1966, leaving Hepworth on her own. "I try to struggle against my utter loneliness and loss of her," she wrote in her diary. But she continued to paint, still signing the pictures with Preece's name, implausible as it sounds. She only disclosed the secret of the deception in the final weeks of her life in 1978. Without Preece, Hepworth found herself unable to organise models, and the two late works on show here are introspective, rather sad self-portraits. 

What a curious and intriguing story this is, with its glimpses of unexpected ways of acting and thinking and a relationship of which it's difficult to fathom the dynamics. The exhibition has come about after years of research by Denys J. Wilcox, whose monograph The Secret Art of Dorothy Hepworth AKA Patricia Preece has been published to coincide with the show. 

Patricia Preece comes over to us, rightly or wrongly, as somewhat manipulative. Or are we wrong? So many questions we can't see the answers to. This is a show that kept us talking for a long time afterwards about the art brought to life by the duo's story. Well worth going to see. When's the movie out?   

Practicalities

Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story is on at Charleston in Lewes in East Sussex until September 8. It's open Wednesdays to Sundays, as well as Bank Holiday Mondays, from 1000 to 1700. Full-price tickets cost £12.50 (£14 with Gift Aid) and can be booked online here, though it was fairly empty when we went midweek. Allow yourself 45 minutes or so to see the exhibition. The recently opened gallery is located just a couple of minutes walk from Lewes station, which on a weekday has trains every 30 minutes from London Victoria, taking just over an hour. 

Images

Dorothy Hepworth (1894-1978, left) and Patricia Preece (1894-1966, right), early 1920s. © Dorothy Hepworth Estate
Dorothy Hepworth, Girl in Blue, c. 1928. © Dorothy Hepworth Estate. Image courtesy private collection
Dorothy Hepworth, Still Life with Fruit and Bottles, c. 1927, Private collection
Dorothy Hepworth, The Green Divan, c. 1935. © Dorothy Hepworth Estate. Image: The Court Gallery
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Patricia Preece, 1933, Southampton City Art Gallery
Dorothy Hepworth, Interior with Woman Reading, Moor Thatch, c. 1932, Private collection  
Dorothy Hepworth, Old Mrs Barnes, c. 1937, Private collection