Biographical note

Renske Mann was born in the Dutch East Indies but had to flee to the Netherlands with her family in 1950 when the former colony gained independence and became Indonesia. At the age of nineteen, she moved to London where she met Cyril Mann, a gifted but still struggling artist twenty-eight years her senior. Convinced of his genius, she offered to become his model and muse as well as giving him the financial support to paint full-time. With his encouragement, she filled in her educational gaps and embarked on a successful business career. Mark Hudson is the art critic of the Independent, and the author of Titian, the Last Days (Bloomsbury). His books on people and places have won some of Britain's most prestigious literary awards: the Somerset Maugham Award and the Thomas Cook Award for Our Grandmothers' Drums, the NCR Award (precursor of the Baillie Gifford Prize) for Coming Back Brockens. His forthcoming work London, While I Wasn't Looking, is a sprawling, collaged memoir of life in the British capital.