Zosik, Sisik, Mamuska: Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska and other ‘anonymous’ women – drawings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925) was a Polish-born writer, who left Krakow for Paris around 1899 to escape her family’s financial ruin, their expectations of marriage for her and to seek independence. Over the next ten years she worked a series of temporary jobs to support herself and her writing, including as a tutor and governess in Paris and New York. She was an avid reader, and it was at the Sainte-Geneviève library in Paris in 1910 at the age of thirty eight that she met the eighteen-year-old sculptor, Henri Gaudier (1891-1915). In one other, they found a companion – each devoted to their art with a comparable degree of intensity. This commitment, when combined with the poverty of their living conditions, their age difference and their contrasting views on sexual intimacy, often tested the strength of their relationship. Nevertheless, they remained devoted to one another.

We’re a couple of queer fish – but it’s quite natural – artists can’t have the same nature as common bourgeois folk. We are capricious and proud and it makes things harder – don’t you think so, Sisik?

Henri Gaudier on Sophie Brzeska

The devastating loss of her partner, and the return of the isolation she had experienced throughout her life, led to a decline in her mental health and Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska was admitted to the County Mental Hospital in 1922, where she died without leaving a will in March 1925. Consequently, Sophie’s estate – combining that of Henri – was managed by the UK Treasury with advice from the National Gallery, where Jim Ede was working at that time. Twenty works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were kept for the National Gallery of British Art (later the Tate Gallery) collection, and a further twenty-one were selected by the Contemporary Art Society (for which Ede was secretary) to be given to other public museums in England. The rest of Henri and Sophie’s literary and artistic estates, Ede managed to acquire through an intermediary in 1927, and it was their correspondence and letters that later enabled him to write his book A Life of Gaudier-Brzeska, published in 1930 and reissued under the title Savage Messiah in 1931.

In securing the reputation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, however, Jim Ede and subsequent scholars omitted to enquire further about the life of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska. In his essay on Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska, Ede admits that he found the details of her life too difficult to sit with for long, confessing, ‘For ten years I have approached nearer and nearer to her personality – hoping to grow sufficiently accustomed to her strange life to be able to enter into it without becoming absorbed – but always I have recoiled.’ More recent scholarship has begun to address this prejudice and historical neglect. Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska’s autobiographical book Matka: and other writings was published in English in 2008 by the Mercury Press, and in 2025, a centenary year celebrating her life, a programme of events is taking place around the UK. Details of these and further reading can be found below.

Curated by Inga Fraser, Senior Curator (House & Collection), with special thanks to Ania Ready and Amy Tobin.