Nina Hamnett died on 16 December 1956 in London after falling from her flat window, impaled on railings below; her death was ruled misadventure.
On 16 December 1956, Nina Hamnett died in London, several days after falling from the window of her Paddington flat and being impaled on the railings below. She was rushed to St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, but succumbed to her injuries. She was 66 years old.
By this point in her life, Hamnett's once-celebrated career as an artist and model of Bohemian Paris and London had long since faded into alcoholism, poverty, and obscurity. She had become a well-known but increasingly pitiable fixture of Fitzrovia pub culture, trading stories of her youthful adventures with Modigliani, Picasso, and the Parisian avant-garde for drinks. Her decline was hastened by a costly and stressful libel lawsuit brought against her and her publisher by the occultist Aleister Crowley over claims made in her 1932 memoir Laughing Torso.
An inquest into her death recorded an open verdict, though it is widely believed and often reported that her fall was a suicide, reportedly after she was heard to say 'why don't they let me die?' Her death marked the tragic end of a woman once hailed as one of the most vital personalities of the modernist art world, embodying both the exhilarating freedoms and the harsh personal costs of the Bohemian life she had pioneered for women of her generation.