Bacon’s India-born muse

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Henrietta Moraes

Indian-born muse of British contemporary artists, Henrietta Moraes, was in the news again as her portrait by Francis Bacon was auctioned by Sotheby’s for £21.3 million.
Henrietta, who was born in 1937 in Simla in British India, was known for her beauty and famous for being a model and the muse of renowned contemporary British artists, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Maggi Hambling.
Henrietta, described as a notorious bonne-vivant, was known for her love affairs with both sexes and a series of marriages. She was even briefly married to Indian poet Dom Moraes in the 1960s and kept the last name of the poet after their separation.
Famous for her bohemian life, which led her to alcohol dependence and a career as a cat burglar that ended with a stint in Holloway prison, according to her autobiography, Henriettta, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1994.
Henrietta, who was born was born Audrey Wendy Abbott, had a tough childhood growing up in England where she was sent as a child after her father deserted his family. Known as “the Queen of Soho,” she was given the name Henrietta by her first husband Michael Law, a filmmaker.
She then married actor Norman Bowler and that marriage broke up in 1956 as she took up with 18-year-old Dom Moraes, at the time a student at Jesus College in Oxford University. Henrietta took Moraes’ last name after they got married in 1961, but the marriage, like her first two marriages, did not survive and ended in a few years.
Henrietta haunted the infamous drinking dens, the Colony Room Club, and the French House, in Soho, and became friends with post-war contemporary artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and the Soho set, which included Vogue photographer John Deakin, in the 1950s.
“Two people I was determined to make friends with because I felt so drawn to them were Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They were both young, not particularly well-known painters, but Lucian’s hypnotic eyes and Francis’ ebullience and charming habit of buying bottles of champagne proved irresistible,” she wrote in her memoirs of the bohemian era.
Bacon, who was gay, was very close to Henrietta who he painted more than 16 times in his painting career.
Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, painted in 1963 from a series of photographs by Deakin, is “quite simply one of the most beautiful, seductive and sexy portraits of a female figure by Bacon,” says Frances Outred, the head of post-war and contemporary art, Europe, at Sotheby’s.
“Henrietta Moraes was a larger than life figure in 1950s Soho and she really captivated the life of Francis. She became one of his key muses,” he adds.
Bacon had asked his friend Deakin to take some nude photographs of Henrietta, as he only painted from photos and not directly from figure. Describing Henrietta as Bacon’s close friend, Leonie Grainger, associate specialist in post-war & contemporary art at Sotheby’s, says, “Bacon only ever depicted friends and never painted the subject from life, preferring to use photographs instead.”
Henrietta was also painted by Lucien Freud, who was her one-time lover, and appeared in his Girl in a Blanket in 1952, which she later used as the cover of her autobiography.
A combination of her hedonistic lifestyle, full of drinking liquor and sampling a variety of drugs, led Henrietta to die at 67 and she was buried in the Brampton Cemetery in west London.
Henrietta also had same sex relationships, including with singer-actress Marianne Faithfull, and the last one was with artist Maggi Hambling, who described as her most powerful muse.