14 Facts About Sheila Legge

Sheila Legge was a Surrealist performance artist.

Sheila Legge was born Sheila C Chetwynd Inglis in 1911 at Penzance in Cornwall, the daughter of Lieutenant James Arthur Chetwynd Inglis of the Scottish Highland Light Infantry, 4th Battalion and Ida Evelyn Kerr, a Scot, from Melbourne, Australia.

Sheila Legge's father was the only child of Major James Argyll Spalding Inglis, commissioner of Nicosia and the grandson of Dr James Inglis, a Scottish physician and author.

In March 1915, while his wife was serving as a nurse in France, Sheila Legge's father joined the 1st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders.

Early in 1934 at Kensington in London, Sheila Legge married her first husband, Rupert Maximilian Faris Sheila Legge and gave birth to a son in April of that year.

In 1935, Sheila Legge wrote to David Gascoyne expressing her fondness for his book A Short Survey of Surrealism and offering to help organize a Surrealist group in England.

At the time Sheila Legge was living in a bedsit in Earl's Court in central London.

The latter scenario is more likely, as Sheila Legge was already moving in Surrealist circles, having her portrait sketched by Man Ray in March 1936.

Gascoyne, whatever the level of collaboration with Sheila Legge, was instrumental in transforming her into a walking "Surrealist Phantom", the living embodiment of a Salvador Dali painting, that the Surrealist group would use to draw attention to the opening of the exhibit.

Once there, Sheila Legge stood in front of the Trafalgar lions as Claude Cahun took photographs, as pigeons began to perch on her outstretched arms.

Sheila Legge would appear in several promotional newspaper articles for the London International Surrealist Exhibition, and would grace the cover of the fourth issue of the International Surrealist Bulletin dressed as the "Phantom Surrealist" in September 1936.

An attractive woman with long blonde hair, Sheila Legge has often been relegated to the role of a "surrealist groupie" by various art historians who have identified her as a possible lover of David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas and Rene Magritte.

Sheila Legge met John Lodwick at Orange in Vichy France on 13 January 1942 while Lodwick was working on his first novel, Running to Paradise, which he dedicated to her when it was published in 1943.

Sheila Legge died on 5 January 1949 while living at Villa Boramar in Banyuls-sur-Mer in the Pyrenees-Orientales region of France and was buried in the Cimetiere Communal de Banyuls-sur-Mer there.