Patricia Preece

It was later discovered that nearly all of the artwork exhibited and sold by Preece was painted by her lifelong lover, Dorothy Hepworth.

While swimming in his lake, she lost her footing and called out; the 74-year-old Gilbert dived in to assist her, but he died of a heart attack.

[3][4] Dramatist W. S. Gilbert, a friend of the Emery family, had an estate nearby called Grim's Dyke, on which there was a lake some distance from the house.

At the subsequent coroner's inquest, Preece stated, "I found that I could not stand and called out and Sir William swam to me.

The family doctor, Dr W.W. Shackleton, and Dr Daniel Wilson of nearby Bushey Heath Cottage Hospital, certified that Gilbert had died at about 4:20 pm that afternoon of syncope (heart failure) brought on by excessive exertion.

Newspapers printed verbatim the statement that Preece had given at the inquest, and they described her as a "fair-haired seventeen-year-old schoolgirl."

[8][9] She was at a finishing school in Lytham St Annes and became engaged to an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve.

[8] In 1918, Preece enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met a talented artist Dorothy Hepworth, who became her lifelong companion.

Preece's early work was praised by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry.

Upon their return to London in 1925, however, they tried to avoid the opprobrium suffered by open lesbians and often claimed to be sisters.

[13] They spent summer holidays in Wales or Cornwall where Preece was again rescued from drowning, this time by a local mineworker.

Preece and Hepworth became friendly with Spencer and his wife, sometimes minding their daughters and joining their art picnics.

Carline's brother Richard was attracted and took Preece dining and dancing, until he understood the nature of her relationship with Hepworth.

The resulting image shows both Carline's ambivalent feelings about Preece and the latter's change in demeanour since her more lighthearted days of financial independence.

"[16] After receiving numerous pleading letters from her husband, Carline divorced Spencer in 1937, and less than a week later, he married Preece in Maidenhead.

[9][17] Preece and Hepworth, however, travelled together to St. Ives for the "honeymoon", while Spencer remained in Cookham to finish a painting.

"[21] No one discovered the fraud during their lifetime, although Spencer mentioned in a letter to his friend Jas Wood that he had never seen Preece paint.

[9] Virginia Woolf bought and liked two drawings so much that she asked Preece to paint a portrait of her friend Ethel Smythe.

[23] Hepworth survived her by a dozen years, slowly losing her eyesight, and was sometimes cared for by Preece's sister Sybil from London.

Preece (as Vivian Spencer) and Hepworth are buried together in Cookham Cemetery under a common monument (pictured).

The painful intricacies of the Preece-Spencer-Carline relationship became the subject in 1996 of a play by the feminist playwright Pam Gems.