Welsh painter Augustus John and his second wife, Dorothy (called “Dorelia”), welcomed a daughter in 1912.
They’d planned to name the baby Elizabeth Anne, but they ended up calling her Poppet. (The British English term poppet is used to refer to “a person, especially a child, that you like or love.”)
Here’s how Poppet’s older bother Romilly (b. 1906) recalled the naming process:
I remember a grand discussion in the walled-in summer-house about what she should be called — a discussion which has been going on ever since. Elizabeth Anne was the provisional choice on that occasion, but it satisfied nobody, and the baby was finally registered as ‘one female child’, pending the discovery of the ideal name. Meanwhile [half-brother] Caspar, contemplating her one day, chanced to remark: ‘What a little poppet it is!’ — and Poppet she was called from that day forward. A real name was still intended to be found for her, but we had not reckoned with the force of habit, and, in spite of intermittent consultation, and at least one attempt to revert to the original suggestion, Anne, she has continued [to be called] Poppet to this day.
I can’t find Poppet’s birth registration online, but “Poppet” is indeed the name used legally in the Marriage Registration Index (three times: 1931, 1940, and 1952) and the Death Registration Index (1997).
Poppet’s third and final marriage was to dutch artist Willem Pol, making fashion model Talitha Pol her step-daughter. After Talitha’s death in 1971, Poppet and Willem raised Talita’s son Tara at their home in the south of France.
Sources:
- Augustus John – Bonhams
- Augustus John – Christie’s
- John, Romilly. The Seventh Child. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975.
- Found via the essay about “The Artist’s Daughter” at the National Gallery of Victoria.
- Poppet – Cambridge English Dictionary
P.S. Caspar John (b. 1903) ended up becoming the head of the Royal Navy in the early 1960s.
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