Description

Inscribed on the front free endpaper ‘Patricia from Stanley. July 27th 1933’. This and the following item are souvenirs of a bizarre marriage of convenience, impossible to more than suggest in a mere catalogue note. The remarkably manipulative Preece trained as a painter at the Slade, where she met her lifelong partner Dorothy Hepworth, whose work she appropriated as her own. Openly a couple when in Paris, on their return to Britain they simulated sisterhood. Preece met Spencer in 1929 and began modelling for him. His increasing obsession for her led to his divorce and marriage to Preece in 1939. The honeymoon was a little unconventional, not least because the groom didn’t go – Preece and Hepworth went to St. Ives on their own.