Kate Lechmere

Kate Lechmere
Kate Lechmere in 1925
Born	Kate Elizabeth Lechmere 13 October 1887 Fownhope, Herefordshire, England
Died	February 1976 (aged 88)
Occupation	Painter and milliner

Kate Elizabeth Lechmere (13 October 1887 – February 1976) was a British painter who with Wyndham Lewis was the co-founder of the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. As far as is known, none of Lechmere's paintings have survived. She served as a nurse in England during the First World War and had a three-year relationship with the poet and critic T.E. Hulme before he was killed. After the war she became a successful milliner.

Lechmere was born in Fownhope, Herefordshire. Her father was Arthur Lechmere, a farmer, and her mother was Alice Lechmere. Kate had two brothers, Arthur and Herbert. The family lived at Bowens, Highland Place, Fownhope, at the time of the 1891 British census and were wealthy enough to employ a nurse and a cook who both lived in. Kate Lechmere was educated at Clifton College. She studied at the Atelier La Palette, Paris, and later under Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art. She was close to Lawrence Atkinson with whom she had studied the piano in Normandy.

Lechmere wrote that she first met Wyndham Lewis in 1912, though according to Paul O'Keeffe it was late 1910 or early 1911. They went to dinner during which Lewis barely spoke, which was not unusual, Rebecca West had the same treatment. Afterwards, Lewis revealed that he had received troubling news. His lover Olive Johnson (19 or 20 years old) had become pregnant by him. By December 1912, Lewis and Lechmere were romantically involved and he wrote to her "I have as many kisses as the envelope will hold. The rest I keep in my mouth for you." He called her "Jacques" because she was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau when they met and she called him "Golliwog" because of his long black hair.

One of the things that Lewis liked about Lechmere was her smile and her laugh, smiles being notably missing from most of Lewis's works in the early 1910s. Lechmere was the model for his Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair and The Laughing Woman, both 1912. In a 1914 interview he commented on the slightly grotesque face of the former, "Although the forms of the figure and head perhaps look rather unlikely to you, they are more or less accurate, as representation. It was done from life".