Portrait of the Artist
1950

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence
(England, 1940)

David Kentish (c.1922-c.1965)

Several references to the artist Bettina Shaw-Lawrence can be found in Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, the 2012 Oxford biography of Gascoyne by Robert Fraser. You'll also find references in Gascoyne's own journals. The public internet sources are a bit scarce, but we've collected a few on this page to give a sense of this painter who's been described as a 'Magical Realist'.

At the end of this page you'll find a link to Fraser's account of locating Shaw-Lawrence through her Bridgeman Art listing in order to interview her for his book, and the subsequent re-discovery of her 1944 pen and ink portrait of her friend David Gascoyne.

We also managed to find a small exhibition catalogue from her first exhibition at Leicester Galleries with John Aldridge. The small, stapled catalogue contains no images, but we show a cover image here to give a sense of the young artist's first show. Click through the image to see the full catalogue.

She also studied at The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing:

from Artist Biographies: British and Irish Artists of the 20th Century

The School was established in 1937 at Dedham, on the Essex/Suffolk border, by Cedric Morris, with the help of John Aldridge, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. The four artists, all members of the 7 & 5 Society, had become disillusioned by the direction that society was taking after the election of Ben Nicholson as Chairman in 1926, especially by Nicholson’s introduction of a ruling that restricted the society's exhibitions to the showing of non-representational work only. Morris was the first to leave, moving to Dedham with his lifelong companion sculptor Arthur Lett-Haines.

They were soon joined by Aldridge, Bawden and Ravilious who all settled a few miles away at Great Bardfield in Essex. The School suffered a devastating fire in 1940 allegedly started by pupil Lucian Freud. It was forced to relocate to Benton End near Hadleigh in Suffolk, where it survived for forty years until the Haines’ demise in 1978. Morris continued to live at Benton End until his death in 1982. Other alumni included Maggi Hambling, David Carr, Lucy Harwood, Joan Warburton and Glyn Morgan.

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from BBC Arts: Cedric Lockwood Morris (1889–1982):

The school was anti-academic in approach: 'what the pupil felt about appearances mattered more than what he or she saw:

drawing, dictated by feeling, could employ emotive distortion'

(Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900, 1986).

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A selection of Cedric Morris paintings from The Art Fund:



Students sometimes worked in the burnt structure, above right.

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence recollects Lucian fixing an assignation with his friend Nigel Mc. and herself to discuss the logistics of their journey to Scotland. The three conspirators met one evening upstairs at the Cafe Royal, a select location probably considered as propitious for discussing their secret plan. It was of paramount importance to prevent Peter Watson from finding out that Bettina was accompanying the two young men on this trip. He was willing to pay for his proteges, but would have refused pointblank to foot the bill where the young woman was concerned. Bettina by her own admission was seen by the influential and affluent homosexuals of London's artistic coterie as a 'troublesome girl'. Nevertheless, her talent and exuberance enabled her to make many friends among whom was Lucian Freud. They had known each other since her return from Paris in 1939 where she had studied art for a year. It was the start of a very close, life-enhancing wartime relationship. According to Bettina Shaw-Lawrence they developed in those early years strong emotional and artistic bonds fraught with rivalry.

The trio set off for Scotland one evening in the middle of a bombing raid towards the end of June 1943. It took for ever, the train stopping every so often during air raids in the middle of the night. The discomfort of the journey is apparent in Freud's sketch Night Train to Inverness, where he has drawn Nigel resting his head on a 'young man's' shoulder. Bettina recollected gazing at the two young men asleep, one fair and the other dark, and thinking how beautiful they looked. At long last they arrived in Inverness to the sound of bagpipes and travelled on to Drumnadrochit by bus.


Left: Lucian Freud's Night Train to Inverness 1943
Right: Poetry London's The Glass Tower by Nicholas Moore, illustrated by Lucian Freud

In a postcard addressed to Elsie Nicholson, revealed by Simon Grant in his article 'Prophecies by Freud', Lucian Freud wrote, 'I am staying at a really hot stuff tip-top hopscotch luxury dive for old dames.' The 'dive' was in fact the Drumnadrochit Hotel, a large Victorian building in the baronial style near Loch Ness. As for the 'old dames', they were dignified old ladies who had had to give up their ancestral homes at the request of the government, which needed such places for hospitals, nursing homes and so on. Freud's card makes no reference to his two travelling companions.

Apparently, the occupants of this eminently respectable establishment were flabbergasted when these three handsome, flamboyantly dressed young people turned up in their hotel lounge. Bettina was wearing a Ross tartan kilt and a red Tyrolean hat with two feathers, her hair in pigtails with bows, Lucian a pair of tartan trousers which he had obtained at the Ritz bar in exchange for his own from a soldier of a Scottish regiment, and tall, handsome Nigel was also dressed in a kilt.

The Scottish interlude got off to a great start. Lucian Freud described in his postcard how thrilled he was by the colours of the scenery and the quality of the light, worthy of Technicolor films. Unfortunately, skirmishes rapidly developed within the trio, his two friends going for long walks on their own while Lucian either moodily drew from his bedroom window or went riding bareback.

– Sandra Boselli

Boy in Luxembourg
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— Betty Shaw-Lawrence, An Herbarium for the Fair: Being a Book of Common Herbs with Etchings
London: The Hand & FLower Press, 1949.