Kate Elizabeth Lechmere (13 October 1887 – February 1976)[1] was a British painter who with Wyndham Lewis was the co-founder of the Rebel Art Centre in 1914.

She studied at the Atelier La Palette, Paris, and later under Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art.

[11] In a 1914 interview he commented on the slightly grotesque face of the former, "Although the forms of the figure and head perhaps look rather unlikely to you, they are more or less accurate, as representation.

[12] About January 1914, Lechmere wrote to Wyndham Lewis from France suggesting that they set up a "modern art Studio in London, run on much the same lines as those in Paris".

[3] The Centre attracted plenty of press attention, including a visit from the Evening Standard for which Lechmere posed pretending to finish one of her paintings.

In fact, she did very little painting at this time as she found the Vorticist aesthetic too abstract and lacking a human dimension.

[7] Lechmere met the imposing critic and poet T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) when Lewis brought him to the Rebel Art Centre.

[7] Some accounts suggest that Lewis had timed the visit to ensure that Lechmere was out and would not meet Hulme, but she returned unexpectedly early from lunch.

[15] In a description that could have been of Lewis, Jacob Epstein, who was otherwise full of praise for Hulme, described him as "large and somewhat abrupt in manner.

Hulme "excluded women for the most part from his evenings, as he said the sex element interfered with intellectual talk – a confession of his own weakness.

A paranoid and insecure Lewis was afraid that he would lose Lechmere and her financial support, and be replaced at the Centre by Hulme or Epstein.

"[5] When Lewis eventually found Hulme at Ethel Kibblewhite's salon at 67 Frith Street, he burst into the room with the words, "What are you doing to me?

[25] Kibblewhite hosted an important artistic and literary salon at her home in Frith Street, London, where Hulme had the use of a room as a study.

She was consulted as a "living witness" to Vorticism,[24] and her obituary in The Times concluded: "To those students of the Modern Movement who sought her out, she was a charming and interested friend.

That lively intelligence which was her passport in the man's world of pre-war London was still very much in evidence in her final years.