Portrait of Bettina Shaw-Lawrence

David Kentish trained under Cedric Morris at the East Anglia School of Art with Bettina Shaw-Lawrence. During the first winter of World War II Kentish rented a room in a retired miner's cottage in Capel Curig, North Wales, with Lucian Freud and the poet Stephen Spender. They spent their days painting and evenings drawing by lamplight. Freud's portrait of his old school friend, David Kentish, along with other sketches that he made at this time, were exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York in 2003.
Bettina Shaw-Lawrence recalls both Freud and Kentish painting her portrait on her 20th Birthday. The portraits remained in storage at the East Anglia School of Art and Cedric Morris ended up leaving Kentish's portrait to his housekeeper, Millie.
Born in 1921, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence left school at 15 to study in Paris with Fernand Léger. She returned to London at the outbreak of the war and spent the summer of 1940 at the East Anglia School of Art. She had her first one man show at the Leicester Galleries in 1947, also exhibiting at the Lefevre and Leger Galleries. The present work was exhibited in the Cedric Morris Retrospective at the Tate in 1984.