Euphemia

A biography of Euphemia Lamb

EuphemiaLamb’s story is the extraordinary history of a woman born in 1887 intoa family without money, education or status, yet she managed to break throughclass barriers by the sheer force of her charisma and beauty.  Her iconoclastic, trailblazing life was aquixotic adventure of courage and bravado; carpe diem was the maxim she livedby. With a sequence of lovers and husbands, and gregarious appetite for living,the choices Euphemia made were a sustained, authentic and ultimately profoundlymoving rejection of the strictures and constraints others sought to impose onher. Euphemiawas one of the most famous artists’ models of the early 1900s. She was a museto Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, and James Dickson Innes. In Paris she becamethe lover of Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of ‘Jules et Jim’, and she was theinspiration for Catherine, the woman at the centre of the passionate menage àtrois depicted in both the novel and Francois Truffaut’s film.