Miss Emmeline Adeane lived alone in London with a solitary maidservant, Nancy, in a tall house at number 2a Tite Street, Chelsea. A handsome woman in her fifties, of rarefied taste and with a fondness for outlandish clothes, including brightly coloured turbans, after the fashion of Madame de Staël, Emmeline Adeane had been able to make some headway into the male-dominated London art world, by exhibiting her paintings in small galleries and by her willingness to paint society portraits, in the manner of Sir Thomas Lawrence, which flattered their subjects – men and women both, and all their exquisitely dressed children, however fat or plain.

A known artist of the 1840s, Mr Jocelyn Hulton, had fallen in love with the beautiful young Miss Emmeline, encouraged in his feelings by the flattering ardour she expressed for his work. Emmeline Adeane and Jocelyn Hulton had struck a bargain in 1847. She would become his mistress, if he would look kindly upon her youthful talent and help her to become the great portraitist she knew herself to be.

This arrangement lasted some five years, during which Emmeline became pregnant no less than four times. To her sorrow and shame, she was unable to carry a child to full term. In exquisite pain and bloody mess, her half-formed babies, one by one, were expelled from her womb into a heavy porcelain dish and put by the Hulton servants into the night-soil bucket, eventually to join with all of London’s fearful evacuations in the waters of the Thames. After the fourth miscarriage, Emmeline was ill for a long time and fell into a deep sadness.

Although Jocelyn Hulton was by then tired of her and what he termed her ‘infernal head-gear’, and had acquired a younger paramour, her predicament moved him. He was rich enough to buy her the house in Tite Street, where he furnished a fine studio for her. He told her that she had no more need of him. She was now a painter ‘of admirable skill and originality’. He gave her, as a parting gift, a handsome pottery wheel and two hundred pounds of clay.

Before he left, he set up the wheel and gave Emmeline one lesson in pottery technique. This lesson was a strangely intimate and troubling thing. It required Jocelyn Hulton to stand behind his once-beloved mistress, would-be mother of no less than four children, press himself closely against her and put his arms round her, to guide her hands in the shaping of the turning clay. These gestures were so tender and the task in hand so sensual that, for a moment, Emmeline was aware of Hulton’s returning desire and wondered whether, after all, he wouldn’t make love to her once more and then change his mind about leaving her. But he moved away quickly, quite as though he were angry with himself for becoming aroused. He told Emmeline she had no need of further lessons; she could now teach herself to make anything she pleased.

One morning, some weeks after Hulton’s departure, with a cold spring rain pelting the skylight of her studio, Emmeline cut a lump of clay and moistened it and kneaded it, before setting it on the wheel. The sound of the rain was like distant applause and Emmeline, who had spent much of the previous time in a state of collapse, dosing herself with laudanum to still the pain of her heart and mind, congratulated herself on standing upright at last, with her hands committed to a new endeavour.