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Bohemia was never a safe country for women.

If they didn't all die of consumption in a garret, many of them might as well have done.

In the 1890s when the new woman sprang, as Max Beerbone put it, fully armed from Ibsen's brain,

their cases tended to follow a pattern.

Attracted by the idea of freedom from social and sexual convention, and the chance to live among artists, even to be artists, they found themselves not in a new world, but in a mirror image

of the old, with as many constraints and fewer comforts. The hoped-for careers rarely developed.

The bohemian man may have idealised women as muses and models,

but he was unhampered by bourgeois obligations to be faithful or to earn money,

though rarely was he so unconventional as to undertake any housework or childcare.

The bohemian woman with children was as much shackled to domesticity as any solicitor's wife,

but without the staff a middle-class household would command, or the security.

Meanwhile, the door to the respectable world had slammed shut behind her.

Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John,

who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view.

In John's unfinished mural, lyric fantasy, painted soon after her death,

Ida stands to one side of the group

of women and children who make up the extended John Menage, a monumental figure in deep shadow.

In his memoir, Kieroscuro, published in 1952, John made no mention of her. Her five sons, the

eldest of whom was five when she died,

...