Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows

English Modernism was graced by five daring and gifted women who were in many respects well in advance of their native male counterparts: Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan in prose, Edith Sitwell in poetry, Elisabeth Lutyens in music and Barbara Hepworth in sculpture. Barbara Ker-Seymer is not remotely in this class. She took some attractive photo-portraits before the war in her studio above Asprey’s and that was it.

After leaving St Paul’s Girls’ School, Barbara was soon drinking, drugging and dancing round town

Not that Barbara cared. Though trained at the Chelsea School of Art, she had a deprecating attitude to her activity which was characteristic of English amateurism and is absolutely maddening when it comes to the arts at a proper level. Woolf, Kavan, Sitwell, Lutyens and Hepworth were deadly serious about their vocations. Barbara had no vocation. She’d carried on the photography business of her boss, the woman who’d taken her virginity, Olivia Wyndham, when Olivia flitted off to the USA to lay siege to Edna Thomas (who succumbed).