Patricia Preece

Patricia Preece (January 1894 – June 1966), born Ruby Vivian Preece, was an English artist associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the second wife of painter Stanley Spencer, for whom she modelled. As a teenager, in 1911, Preece was involved in the death of dramatist W. S. Gilbert. While swimming in his lake, she lost her footing and called out; the 74-year-old Gilbert dived in to assist her, dying of a heart attack. She soon adopted the name Patricia and became engaged, but her progressive views displeased her fiancé, who terminated their engagement.

In 1918, Preece met her lifelong lover, Dorothy Hepworth, at the Slade School of Fine Art. After further studies in Paris, the two returned to Britain. In 1928, they moved to Cookham and befriended the artist Stanley Spencer. Spencer became obsessed with the flirtatious Preece, and he showered her with gifts. She persuaded him to divorce his first wife and to sign his house over to her. Preece married Spencer in 1937, but she did not leave Hepworth and refused to have sexual relations with Spencer. She eventually evicted Spencer from the house, and would not grant him a divorce, but continued to receive payments from him. After he was knighted in 1959, she insisted on being styled Lady Spencer and claimed a pension as his widow.

Throughout their lives, the gregarious Preece exhibited and sold the shy Hepworth's paintings under her own name, causing the artist Augustus John to declare Preece one of the six greatest women artists in England. In later years, Preece traded in antiques. The Preece-Spencer relationship was dramatised in the 1996 Olivier Award-winning play Stanley.

Preece was born in Kensington in London to an Army officer, James Duncan Preece (1866–1940), and Ada Maude Webb (1865–1936), who married in 1891 in Kensington. She had an elder sister, Sibyl Duncan Preece (1892–1991), and a younger brother, Graham Duncan Preece (1899–1975). By 1911, Preece and her brother were boarding at a school at 76 Weldon Crescent, Harrow on the Hill. The school was run by two young women, Rebbie Freuer Wright (b. 1886) and Winifred Isabel Emery (1890–1972), the niece of the actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery.

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