English artist Maggi Hambling was BOTD in 1945. Born in Suffolk, she studied art in her teens, graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1969. While predominantly a painter, she turned to sculpture later in her career, winning a number of important public commissions. Her best known public sculpture, 1998’s A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, was London’s first public monument to the once-disgraced gay playwright. The statue portrays Wilde rising from a green granite coffin and brandishing a cigarette, with space for passersby to sit next to his effigy. Condemned by art critics though beloved by the public, it has become a popular meeting place for gay nightclubbers on their way to the nearby gay club Heaven. Hambling also faced criticism for her 2003 commission Scallop, a giant scallop shell on a beach near Aldeburgh in Sussex to commemorate gay composer Benjamin Britten, with some locals complaining that the statue ruined the view of the beach. Her 2018 sculpture for the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft featured a tiny naked woman rising from organic matter, enraging some feminists due to its diminutive size and apparent reference to Frankenstein, the novel written by Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley. Hambling was the 1995 recipient of the Jerwood Painting Prize, and received the Marsh Award for Scallop. Describing herself as “lesbionic”, she had a relationship with Soho legend Henrietta Moraes in the last year of Moraes’ life. She has lived with her partner Victoria Dennistoun since the 1980s.