English artist Marlow Moss was BOTD in 1889. Born Marjorie Moss in London to a middle-class family, she studied at the St John’s Wood School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. In her late teens, she suffered a nervous breakdown, apparently triggered by anxiety over her sexuality. Abandoning her studies at the Slade, she moved to Cornwall in 1919, returning to London as a crop-haired androgyne and renaming herself Marlow. She moved to Paris, studying at the Académie Moderne and apprenticing with Modernist artist Fernand Léger and forming a relationship with the novelist Antoinette (Nettie) Nijhoff. A close friend of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, she adopted his spare geometric style of intersecting black lines and squares of vivid colour. Widely assumed to simply be copying Mondrian, she developed and extended his technique, introducing parallel double-grid lines into her work, which Mondrian later copied. At the outbreak of World War Two, Moss and Nijhoff fled to the Netherlands and hustled their way onto a freight tanker to England. They settled in the village of Lamorna in West Cornwall, where Moss studied architecture at the Penzance School of Art, riding to and from her classes in a pony and trap, dressed as a jockey. At Mondrian’s prompting, she wrote to Modernist artist Ben Nicholson in nearby St Ives, who never replied, and had little to no contact with other members of the (largely male) St Ives Group. Largely unrecognised for much of her life, solo exhibitions of her work were staged in London in the 1950s. Moss died in 1958 aged 69. Interest in her work has grown since her death, with major retrospectives of her work at the Tate Britain and the Haus Konstruktiv Zürich. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.