- Bettina Shaw-Lawrence (England, 1940)
- Oil on canvas
- Collection: RDK
Attached to reverse of frame are two labels: Tate Gallery and Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, which is inscribed Cedric Morris and Bettina Shaw-Lawrence N.F.S.
Dimensions: 51.00cm wide 61.00cm high (20.08 inches wide 24.02 inches high)
Provenance: Sir Cedric Morris; bequeathed to: Cedric Morris’s housekeeper, Millie. Sold at auction, Christie’s, 15 Nov. 2006.
Exhibition History
London, The Tate Gallery, Cedric Morris 28 March – 13 May 1984, number 65
Description / Expertise
David Kentish trained as an artist under Cedric Morris at the East Anglia School of Art, together with Lucien Freud and Bettina Shaw-Lawrence. Kentish spent the first winter of the 2nd World War in Capel Curig, Wales, with Lucien Freud and the poet Stephen Spender, where they rented a room in a retired miner’s house. They spent their days painting and the evenings drawing by lamplight. The winter was hard and there was little to do except work, read, talk and listen to the recordings of Bach that Kentish had brought. Freud’s portrait of David Kentish, his rugger-playing school friend form Bryanston public school, along with the sketches he made at this time, was exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York in 2003.
Later, Kentish was also an actor and acting and stage management gradually took over his life. In New York on Broadway he acted in King Henry IV Part 1 & Part II and Oedipus Rex (1946) and was the production stage manager on Anthony and Cleopatra (1951) and Venus Observed( 1952).
Although this painting was in the Cedric Morris retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1984, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence states that on her 20th birthday, both Lucien Freud and David Kentish painted portraits of her and gave them to her. Bettina and David were romantically involved at the time. She also has stated that she was deprived of both portraits by the school, placed in the store room of the school and never returned. Cedric Morris left the portrait by Kentish to his housekeeper, Millie.
Bettina Shaw-Lawrence was born in London in 1921 and left school at the age of 15 to study painting in Paris with Fernand Leger. At the outbreak of the war she returned to London and spent the summer of 1940 at Cedric Morris’ school in Suffolk. She first exhibited in mixed exhibitions both at the Lefevre and Leger Galleries. Her first “one man” show was at the Leicester Galleries in 1947, when she was 26 after she had returned to Paris at the end of the war. She travelled extensively in Europe and lived in Madrid. She now lives in Rome and has exhibited there, in Paris and New York.