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Nina Hamnett was ‘deadly serious about painting’, as she put it in
Laughing Torso, a collection of her reminiscences published in 1932. A photograph of her as a young woman in her studio shows her standing with confidence, obscuring her easel, in wide-legged crêpe trousers and sandals, a cigarette in hand, her expression both earnest and ironic. At art school, under the tutelage of William Nicholson, she learned still life, placing objects – everyday, domestic things: an inkwell, an hydra jug, a two-handled cup, a small glass of white wine – not-quite squarely within the frame, the objects cropped at their edges. She disobeyed the conventions of the genre: no luminous porcelain, no flowers; the paintings do not glow. Her palette was London rooftops on a grey afternoon, solid browns and gloomy greens reflecting the material conditions of the paintings’ setting: a wooden tabletop in a rented room in Fitzrovia. In portraiture, she went beyond formality, finding ways to conv