A Life in Persepective ; Painter and Muse to Lucian Freud, Sophie de Stempel Reveals Why Marriage to Actor Sir Ian Holm has Finally Made Her Want to Show the World Her Work

Summary

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Her friends say that artist Sophie de Stempel works her life into her canvases. And even the uninitiated would hazard a guess that the subject of a powerful series of portraits on display in her studio is important to her. It is the actor Sir Ian Holm.

'That was the first one,' she says of an image, in blue, of Holm slumped and brooding. 'That was very much how I saw him at the time. His marriage had broken down, he had recently had cancer, his life had changed. It was the first time he had been alone for a while. He possessed that quality of people who are on their own and are trying to find their way back into the world.'

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A Life in Persepective ; Painter and Muse to Lucian Freud, Sophie de Stempel Reveals Why Marriage to Actor Sir Ian Holm has Finally Made Her Want to Show the World Her Work

The second, though, shows a man who has re-engaged with life. A pair of high heels lies beneath his chair. They are Sophie's. Within eight months of his sitting for her in February 2003, the couple were quietly married in America, he, at 72, for the fourth time, and Sophie, at 42, for the first. It was a joyous act of optimism, though she found relinquishing her independence in one brief service 'traumatising'.

'My mother had wanted me to be married for so long, she had talked and talked about it, and...

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