Clare Sheridan

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Clare Consuelo Sheridan
Born
Clare Consuelo Frewen

9 September 1885
London, England
Died31 May 1970 (aged 84)
Occupation(s)Sculptor and writer
Spouse
William Frederick Sheridan
​
​
(m. 1910)​
ChildrenMargaret Sheridan
Elizabeth Sheridan (1913–1914)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1915–1937)
Parent(s)Moreton Frewen
Clarita Jerome

Clare Consuelo Sheridan (née Frewen; 9 September 1885 – 31 May 1970) was an English sculptor, journalist and writer, known primarily for creating

Princess Margaret of Sweden, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Lady Diana Cooper, Vita Sackville-West[3] and Vivien Leigh
.

Early life

Clare Consuelo Frewen was born in London, the daughter of

convent school and a German finishing school.[1] She was a debutante at the age of seventeen but turned away from that social scene to attempt to write novels. She was encouraged in this by family friends who included both Henry James and Rudyard Kipling.[4]

She married Captain William Frederick Sheridan (1879–1915) in 1910 at

First World War while leading his men at the Battle of Loos in 1915, a few days after the birth of the couple's third child, their son Richard.[6] Lord Alexander Thynne, a Conservative MP and also an army officer who was killed in the same war in 1918, was reportedly a lover of Claire.[7]

Sheridan moved from France to London to study under John Tweed and Professor Édouard Lantéri. An exhibition of her work was a success and led to a number of commissions including a bust portrait of H. H. Asquith for the Oxford Union.[6]

Soviet Russia

Bust of Lev Kamenev by Sheridan

In the summer of 1920, the first

Soviet Russian trade delegation to visit London invited Sheridan to travel to Russia to make busts of notable revolutionaries. The British authorities refused to issue her visa but she sailed with the delegation to Stockholm where Lev Kamenev obtained an Estonian visa for her.[6] She stayed in the Kremlin for two months, where her sculpting subjects included Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev.[1]
While in Russia, Sheridan is reputed to have had affairs with more than one of her sitters. Her reputed relationship with Kamenev is thought to have started the problems in his marriage to his first wife, Olga Kameneva.[8] The author Robert Service claimed, in 2009, that there was an affair between Sheridan and Trotsky.[9] Trotsky signed and dedicated a painting of himself to Sheridan and invited her to stay in Russia and set up a studio. During her stay, the Russian Civil War was being fought. Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, was pressing for British and allied intervention and was furious to learn of Sheridan's activities. When she returned to London, Churchill refused to see her, and after finding herself widely shunned in polite society due to her support of Bolshevism, she moved to America.

In January 1921, Sheridan and her son, Richard sailed aboard the

White Movement, they became friends. Sheridan described Koehler as "heaven sent", writing that "Koehler promised to be at my side in case of need. He was amazingly kind and put up with infinite boredom and waiting on our account."[12] In a letter Koehler wrote in 1922, he mentioned the "famous Mrs. Sheridan at whom the Foreign Office thundered so loudly... and yet be it known (although this, of course, is closely guarded) that she was an agent for the British Intelligence Service."[11]

Journalism

Sheridan, Hugo Koehler (holding her son, Richard) and others, aboard RMS Aquitania, January 1921

While visiting America, Sheridan had a love affair with

Greco-Turkish War.[6] Sheridan interviewed Aleksandar Stamboliyski in Bulgaria, Benito Mussolini in Rome and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.[13]

In late 1922,

Lord Curzon by attaching herself to the Italian delegation, with Italy then opposing Britain's stance. She was seen dancing with Mussolini's private secretary. As she was believed to have installed herself in a battleship under French protection at the preceding Mudania conference, with France having undermined Britain's efforts to keep the Bosphorus open, and to have had an affair with Kemal Atatürk, Curzon asked Harold Nicolson (an attending Foreign Office diplomat) to 'try and get rid of her'. Nevertheless, Vita Sackville-West (Nicolson's wife) got to hear that he 'was seeing a lot of her' and challenged him with this. She is described at this time as 'beautiful, intelligent, meddlesome, and man-mad'.[14]

A second trip to Russia in 1923 ended in her becoming disillusioned with the course of the Revolution and she was declared 'persona non grata' in the country. Despite this, Sheridan persuaded the Soviet representative to London to issue an entry visa for her and her brother to tour the south of the country.[6] In 1924, Sheridan and her brother, Royal Navy officer Oswald Frewen, made a then-daring long-distance motorcycle riding journey from Sussex through Europe to the USSR, ending in Odessa. The 4,226-mile (6,801 km) ride[15] occurred between July and September 1924 with Frewen at the controls of a 799 cc, 7 hp AJS motorcycle and Sheridan in the sidecar.[6][16] The AJS, nicknamed Satanella, is said to have been the first British motorcycle in the Soviet Union.[17] Sheridan published a memoir of the journey, Across Europe with Satanella in 1925. She moved to Constantinople with her two children and gave up journalism to focus on sculpture.

Sheridan's dalliance with known Soviet agents earned her the suspicions of the Security Service. She earned an MI5 file that noted: "She has conducted herself in a disloyal manner in various foreign countries, adopting a consistently anti-British attitude."[18] Later, in 1925, Sheridan moved to Algeria, where it was noted by MI5 that "she appeared to be comfortably off and debt-free for the first time in 10 years".[18] She built a house on the edge of the Sahara at Biskra.

Later life

Bronze bust of Sir Oswald Birley, All Saints Church, West Dean in East Sussex

In 1935, Sheridan’s 19-year old son, Richard Brinsley, began to make a name for himself as a writer, when he published his book ‘’Heavenly Hell: The Experiences of an Apprentice in a Four-Mast Barque’’, describing his ten-months in Gustaf Erikson’s windjammer Lawhill[19] He died of appendicitis in 1937 at Constantine in Algeria. His mother took a large oak tree from the family home, Brede Place, in Sussex and carved it into his memorial. Carving in wood seems to have given her a fresh artistic direction. In the same year, she spent a summer at the artists' colony at Glacier National Park, established by Winold Reiss, and travelled among the Blackfeet.[20]

Sheridan had a well-received exhibition in London of the carvings she made there from tree trunks. During World War Two she and Winston Churchill put aside their political differences and she made a bust portrait of him whilst he painted her portrait. After the war she converted to

Franciscan convent at Hope Castle at Castleblayney in Ireland.[21] From there, she continued to sculpt, albeit subjects and icons of religious importance before returning to live in Belmont House in Hastings, Sussex in 1956. In 1958 she sculpted a life-size figure head of a helmsman for the Hastings Fishermen's Museum.[22]

Death

She died in 1970 at the age of 84, having outlived two of her three children. She is buried in the churchyard of St George's, Brede, Sussex beside her nephew Roger Frewen [d 1972] and her great-niece Selina Frewen [d 1972] and near the memorial she had carved to her son.

Surviving artworks

Sheridan's busts of her first cousin Churchill can be found at

Peper Harrow near Guildford, at St. Catherine's in Hoogstraeten in Belgium, at the Church of Christ the King Salthill in Galway, Ireland and at Allington Castle in Maidstone.[6]

Written works

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Grant M. Waters (1975). Dictionary of British Artists Working 1900–1950. Eastbourne Fine Art.
  2. ^ "Search the Collection, Clare Sheridan". National Portrait Gallery, London. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  3. ^ a b James Lees-Milne (1980). Harold Nicolson - a biography. Chatto and Windus.
  4. ISBN 1857432282
    .
  5. ISSN 1471-6941
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-19-861400-4
    .
  7. ISSN 0307-1235
    . Retrieved 24 May 2020.
  8. ISBN 0-87113-924-3
  9. ^ Simon Sebag Montefiore (11 October 2009). "Trotsky by Robert Service: review". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 24 January 2010.
  10. ^ The New York Tribune. January 31, 1921.
  11. ^ a b Our Man in the Crimea: Commander Hugo Koehler and the Russian Civil War. P.J. Capelotti. University of South Carolina Press. (1991) pg. 173-174.
  12. ^ Mayfair to Moscow: Clare Sheridan's Diary (1921 Bonie & Liverite). Sheridan, Clare. p. 229-235
  13. ^
    ISBN 0-333-67442-1
    .
  14. ^ Harold Nicolson - a biography James Lees-Milne, Chatto and Windus 1980, p.192
  15. ^ "The "Satanella" Epic", The Examiner, Tasmania, p. 6, 30 January 1926
  16. ^ Plummer, Roy (February–March 2012), "Clare Sheridan" (PDF), Sunbeam Club News, Sunbeam Motor Cycle Club, p. 15, archived from the original (PDF) on 7 March 2016, retrieved 31 March 2015
  17. ^ Tesch, Bernd (11 May 2014), Europa-Motorrad-Reisen [Europe by Motorcycle] (in German), retrieved 20 May 2014
  18. ^ a b Neil Tweedie & Peter Day (28 February 2002). "MI5 suspected Churchill's cousin was a red spy". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 24 January 2010.
  19. ^ Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘’Heavenly Hell: The Experiences of an Apprentice in a Four-Mast Barque’’ London: Putnam, 1935.
  20. ISBN 0802048919
    .
  21. ^ Wolfgang & Petra Lubitz (2004). "A feature about Clare Consuelo Sheridan". LubitzTroskyanaNet. Retrieved 28 July 2015.
  22. ^ Steve Peak. "The History of the Fisherman's Museum". Hastings Chronicle. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  23. ^
    ISBN 0-8103-0402-3
    .
  24. ^
    ISBN 0902028553
    .

External links
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