Born in Tenby, Wales

Nina Hamnett was born on 14 February 1890 in the seaside town of Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales. She was the daughter of an army officer, and her early childhood was spent moving between garrison towns as befitted a military family of the late Victorian era.

Her upbringing was conventional and somewhat constrained, typical of a genteel British family of the period, but Hamnett showed an early rebellious streak and a fierce independence of spirit that would come to define her adult life. She was educated in a manner typical for girls of her class, but she resisted the domestic expectations placed upon her, gravitating instead toward drawing and the arts from a young age.

This Welsh birth and military-family background stand in stark contrast to the bohemian, unconventional life she would later lead in London and Paris, where she became known as the 'Queen of Bohemia'. Her early years in Tenby, and later in Wales more broadly, are commemorated locally, including by the Narberth Museum, as the origin point of one of the most vivid and iconoclastic figures of early twentieth-century British art and letters.