Henrietta Moraes

Henrietta Moraes (born Audrey Wendy Abbott) (1931 - 6 January 1998) was a London socialite, and artist's model and muse in the 1950s and 1960s.

Early life

Moraes was born in Simla, India in 1931. Shortly thereafter, her father, who was in the Indian Air Force deserted her mother. She was raised harshly by her tyrannical grandmother in England and later went to secretarial college.

Artist's model and muse

By 1950, she was working as an artists' model in several London art schools.

A denizen of the Colony Room, Soho she became the muse of a number of important British artists in the early 1950s through the mid-1960s.

Francis Bacon painted her at least sixteen times, and Lucian Freud (with whom she had an affair) at least three times, with Bacon particularly enthralled by her mercurial character.

Moraes was an alcoholic and later, a drug addict. She was a notorious bon vivant and led a generally hedonistic lifestyle. In the 1960s, she was an unsuccessful cat burglar, leading to time in Holloway Prison.

Later in life, she found sobriety and penned a volume of short stories and memoirs (titled "Henrietta") with the encouragement of her friend, the writer Francis Wyndham.

Marriages and children

Moraes was married three times and had two children:

In 1950, she met her first husband, film-maker Michael Law, who bestowed the name Henrietta on her.

Her second husband was bodybuilder Norman Bowler, and he was also the father of her two children, Joshua and Caroline. This marriage ended in 1956.

Later in 1956, she met the 18-year-old Indian poet Dom Moraes. She seduced him the following year and they married in 1960. They were amicably divorced by the mid-1961s.

Later life

In the mid-1970s, Henrietta Moraes shared a mews flat in Hanover Terrace, Regents Park, with singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, an episode in both their lives that forms a key chapter in Faithfull's "Memories Dreams & Reflections", published in October 2007.

In her last year of life, Moraes developed a close relationship with artist Maggi Hambling, who produced a posthumous volume of charcoal portraits of her.

She died in London in 1998 in her one-room Chelsea flat, leaving only a handful of possessions and a large pile of unpaid bills.

She is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

External links

* [http://teens_scene.tripod.com/id35.html Obituary from her son Josh]
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3805114,00.html Obituary from The Guardian ]