thumb|right|Iris Tree in 1923

Iris Tree (27 January 1897 – 13 April 1968) was an English poet, actress, and art model, described as a bohemian, an eccentric, a wit, and an adventurer.

Biography

thumb|right|Tree was the model for this c. 1916 painting by [[Amedeo Modigliani.]]

Iris Tree's parents were actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Helen Maud, Lady Tree. Her sisters were actresses Felicity and Viola Tree. An aunt was author Constance Beerbohm, and her uncles were explorer and author Julius Beerbohm and caricaturist and parodist Max Beerbohm. The Epstein sculpture was displayed at the Tate Britain. She was often photographed by Man Ray, was friends with Nancy Cunard for a time, and acted alongside Diana Cooper in the mid-1920s.

Iris studied at the Slade School of Art. She contributed verse to the 1917 Sitwell anthology Wheels; her published collections were Poems (1919), The Traveller and other Poems (1927), and The Marsh Picnic (1966).

See also

  • Beerbohm family

References

Further reading

  • Daphne Fielding (1974). The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree, London: Eyre Methuen
  • Sarah Parker (2022) "Gaudy Havoc: Iris Tree’s performative decadent modernism", Feminist Modernist Studies, 5:2, pp. 181–209
  • Tree archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, University of Bristol