![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com\/inline\/ymcewlxefj-1767677592.jpg\" "\\"Madonna")
Madonna and Child. Credit: The Sphere\/Newspapers.com.London acts<\/p>\nIn 1925, British newspapers announced that the eminent sculptor Jacob Epstein had found a new muse. She was neither English nor European. The Daily Record described her as beautiful \u201cin a way that perhaps only women of the east can be beautiful\u201d, praising the inscrutability of her expression, the \u201csymmetry of [her] form and dignity of mien\u201d. Her name was Sunita Devi and she had arrived from India with a small child, an older sister and a past that has now blurred into legend.<\/p>\n
Sunita posed for many of Epstein\u2019s ambitious works. She became the face of his celebrated Madonna and Child as well as Lucifer, and the subject of several of his drawings and sculptures. Other women competed for Epstein\u2019s attention too, but, if British newspapers are to be believed, it was Sunita who was the most intriguing and enigmatic of them all. By the time she disappeared from London six years later, she had left behind a trail of rumours and sculptures that bear her features.<\/p>\n
Almost everything known about Sunita before her arrival in England comes second-hand from Epstein\u2019s biographers and from newspapers eager for sensation.<\/p>\n
She was born in 1897, according to some accounts, and was said to be a Kashmiri Muslim. Her original name was Amina or Armina. She lived in Bombay with her husband Ahmed Peerbhoy, heir to one of the city\u2019s most influential business families. Adamjee Peerbhoy, the family patriarch, had risen from poverty to build cotton mills and tanneries and serve as sheriff of Bombay and president of the Muslim League.<\/p>\n
She left behind the comforts of her life in Bombay to move to England.<\/p>\n
Madonna and Child. Credit: The Sphere\/Newspapers.com.London acts<\/p>\n
Sunita arrived in London with her young son Enver or Anvar, no more than four years old, and her older sister, Miriam Patel. One newspaper claimed that both women had \u201cabandoned\u201d their husbands in India, unwilling to submit to the lives prescribed for them. Miriam shed her name and became Anita Devi. Amina was now Sunita Devi.<\/p>\n
Another version of events suggests the sisters were entranced by Anna Pavlova when the celebrated dancer visited India in 1922. Though Pavlova claimed to be disappointed by Indian dance forms, which she felt required \u201curgent revival\u201d, she was deeply impressed by the Ajanta frescoes. In 1923, Pavlova staged two acclaimed collaborations with Uday Shankar in London: Krishna Radha and Oriental Impressions.<\/p>\n
Whether the sisters performed in these productions is difficult to establish, but they did join Pavlova\u2019s company in 1925. In one account, provided by Sunita to a newspaper, the sisters were spotted in a London restaurant by someone, perhaps a talent scout from Anna Pavlova\u2019s company. Around this time, the sisters ran a stall at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park, where they sold \u201cOriental\u201d artefacts, including ivory objects, Benares brassware, trinkets, jewellery and even items described as erotica.<\/p>\n
While Anita continued as a dancer, performing small acts in productions such as Alf\u2019s Button and Slaves of a Caravan, Sunita\u2019s career took a very different turn. Soon, glowing reports appeared of \u201cPrincess Sunita\u2019s\u201d occult abilities and her supposed gifts as a psychic. Advertising her programme with the slogan \u201cYou ask\u2014I tell\u201d, Sunita reportedly evoked laughter and admiration in equal measure with her uncanny responses to audience questions.<\/p>\n
Sunita also appeared in the Maskelyne brothers\u2019 magic act. One of her feats involved lying submerged in a water tank on stage for over five minutes, apparently breathing through a transparent, nearly invisible hose.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com\/inline\/fhrauhwbvb-1767677819.jpg\" "\\"Sunita")
Sunita Devi. Credit: Kansas City Journal\/Newspapers.com.<\/p>\n
The sisters entered Jacob Epstein\u2019s orbit in 1925, shortly after the British Empire Exhibition. One account suggests the painter Matthew Smith (1879-1959) first encountered Sunita and made her his muse. One of his best-known paintings of her is A Red Sari: Sunita Reclining<\/a>. A few months later, she began modelling for Epstein, as did her son and, on occasion, her sister. Epstein described her as one of those \u201cdivinely discontented models\u201d, possessing an \u201cexotic, undefinable quality\u201d.<\/p>\n Predatory figure<\/p>\n Sunita, Anita and Enver even became members of Epstein\u2019s household, sharing his Bloomsbury home with his sculptor wife Margaret. This arrangement was initiated by Margaret herself, largely, as Epstein\u2019s biographers suggest, to counter the influence of his younger mistress and model, Kathleen Garman. In one lurid episode, Margaret even shot Garman \u2013 and it was only Epstein\u2019s intervention that prevented the matter from being taken to the police.<\/p>\n Epstein was already renowned as a radical, unconventional and controversial figure. Born in New York in 1880 to Jewish parents from eastern Europe, he trained as an artist in Paris before settling in London. He drew profound inspiration from the immense Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum.<\/p>\n His career was marked early by scandal. In 1908, his monument to Oscar Wilde at P\u00e8re Lachaise Cemetery in Paris provoked outrage, and his later sculptures for the British Medical Association building on the Strand attracted both admiration and condemnation for their uncompromising depictions of the human body. Similar reactions greeted Rima, his memorial to the American naturalist and writer WH Hudson in Hyde Park, though in this case, Epstein found unexpected defenders in his own models.<\/p>\n In his choice of sitters, Epstein gravitated toward the \u201cdaringly different\u201d and the \u201cflagrantly bohemian\u201d. In ways that would today be described as predatory<\/a>, many of his models also became his mistresses, though this cannot be established in Sunita\u2019s case. Margaret, by most accounts, actively encouraged such arrangements in order to keep Garman at bay.<\/p>\n Sunita appears in several of Epstein\u2019s best-known works. Between 1925 and 1931, he sculpted four figures based on her, one of Enver and one of Anita. Sunita and Enver posed together for the first version of Madonna and Child (1926-27). Epstein also produced numerous drawings of Sunita in pencil, charcoal and watercolour, as well as studies of mother and son and of the sisters together.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com\/inline\/jbwpkcfvfa-1767677961.jpg\" "\\"Jacob")