Kathleen Garman

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Lady Epstein, nee Kathleen Garman, (1902-1979) was the third Garman sister, the seven daughters (and two sons) of Walter and Margaret Garman, an eccentric Victorian doctor, lead notoriously high profile lives within mid 20th century artistic circles. Having grown up in the bleak surroundings of the ‘Black Country’ at Oakeswell Hall, Wednesbury, in England they were prominent in London's Bohemian Bloomsbury set, between the two world wars. The complex lives of the dazzling beauties Mary, Kathleen and Lorna included affairs with writer Vita Sackville-West; composer Ferruccio Busoni, painter Bernard Meninsky, sculptor Jacob Epstein; and the poet and novelist Laurie Lee.

In her youth Kathleen and her sister Mary made their siblings sell family possessions in order to buy cigarettes, French novels and visit the movies. They also bought drinks in the local miners' pub and ran away to London when Mary was twenty-one, where they lived in a one-room studio at 13 Regent Square, Camden, part of Bloomsbury. Their circle of friends and aquaintances now numbered high-brows, Jews, poets, authoresses, painters, singers, ballet dancers, and an economist (probably John Maynard Keynes), and they frequented West End clubs such as The Gargoyle, The Harlequin and The Cave of the Golden Calf.

Kathleen married Sir Jacob Epstein in 1955, having been his lover since 1925 and being mother to 3 of his children, during which period his wife Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen, plus encouraging him into multiple affairs in the hope he would tire of Kathleen and ‘return home’. On the death of Margaret, Kathleen became Lady Epstein and his sole beneficiary. She donated his works to the Israel Museum, and many can now be seen in the Garman Ryan Collection at the New Art Gallery in Walsall.

Her daughter Kitty became the first wife of the painter Lucian Freud and is the subject in his painting of Girl with a white dog, 1951 - 1952, held at the Tate Gallery