English aristocrat and socialite Stephen Tennant was BOTD in 1906. Born in Wiltshire, he was the youngest son of Edward Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner and the aristo-socialite Pamela Wyndham, and a childhood friend of fellow future queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. His mother encouraged his creative pursuits, arranging his first art exhibition when he was 15. Bolstered by his trust fund, he shrugged off university and became a dedicated socialite. He became a prominent member of the aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things, socialising with Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Robert Byron, Tom Driberg, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, James Lees-Milne, Nancy and Tom Mitford, Richard, David and Olivia Plunket Greene, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Stephen Tennant and Evelyn Waugh. Openly gay since forever and fearlessly effeminate, he became famous for wearing make-up in public, dyeing his hair and unsuccessfully attempting to write a novel. Described by Osbert Sitwell as “the last professional beauty”, he was sculpted by Jacob Epstein and became a favourite model of Beaton, whose louche photographs of Tennant helped boost both their reputations. He travelled through Europe and the United States with heiress Barbara Hutton – disembarking his ship in New York in full make-up, his hair in marcel waves and clutching a bouquet of orchids – and met Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Willa Cather. In 1927, he inherited Wilsford House, which he had redecorated by Syrie Maugham, entertaining his friends Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen and the poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he had an eight-year relationship. After World War Two, he became a recluse, collecting antiques and receiving visitors from his bed, liberally doused in perfume. Celebrity queers who made the pilgrimage to Wilsford included Truman Capote, David Hockney, Kenneth Anger, and Christopher Isherwood. Tennant suffered from depression throughout his life, with multiple stays in hospitals and courses of electro-shock treatment. His closest neighbour in his final years was the Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul, who lived with his wife on the Wilsford estate; he and Tennant corresponded for for six years, though never met in person. Tennant inspired a number of literary portraits, mostly published within his lifetime, including Miles Malpractice in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies; the alcoholic aesthete Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited; the flaming queen Cedric Hampton in Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate; and the eccentric protagonist of Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival. He died in 1987, aged 80. His life and legacy was boosted by Philip Hoare‘s successful 1991 biography Serious Pleasures.