Henrietta Moraes

Henrietta Moraes (22 May 1931 – 6 January 1999) was a British artists' model and memoirist. During the 1950s and 1960s, she was the muse and inspiration for many artists of the Soho subculture, including Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and (much later) Maggi Hambling, and also known for her marriages and love affairs. She left her first husband, Michael Law, and married actor Norman Bowler, with whom she had two children. She later married the Indian writer Dom Moraes.

She was born Audrey Wendy Abbott in Simla, India, where her father was stationed in the Indian Air Force. Her father deserted her mother when Audrey was young, and she was raised harshly by a tyrannical, abusive grandmother in England. Later she went to secretarial college.

By 1950, when she was nineteen years old, Moraes was working as an artists' model in several London art schools. A denizen of the Colony Room, Soho, she became the muse to a number of important British artists in the early 1950s through the mid-1960s. Francis Bacon, who was particularly enthralled by her mercurial character, painted her at least sixteen times from photographs specifically commissioned by him from John Deakin: in May 2002, Bacon's "Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes" was sold by Ernst Beyeler for $6.7 million, and in February 2012 Bacon's 1963 "Portrait of Henrietta Moraes" sold for £21.3 million.Lucian Freud, with whom she had an affair, painted Moraes at least three times, including a celebrated 1953 portrait entitled Girl in a Blanket.

Moraes was notoriously free-spirited and led a generally hedonistic lifestyle. In the 1960s, she was an unsuccessful cat burglar hampered by amphetamine psychosis, leading to time in Holloway Prison. As if anticipating her decline, Bacon famously painted her with a syringe a decade before she became a self-confessed "junkie". Later in life, she found sobriety and penned a volume of short stories and memoirs (entitled Henrietta) with the encouragement of her friend, the writer Francis Wyndham.

...
Wikipedia