School discipline came as a shock, and she was expelled from one Roman Catholic convent after another due to her “eccentricity, usually a combination of anti-social tendencies and certain supernatural proclivities”. The one thing she did learn was a love of art. Her father was not keen on her going to art school (artists live in garrets and die of starvation, he said), but her mother intervened and she was allowed to study at Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence. There, she was exposed to the Italian Renaissance masters, whose love of rich colours were to inspire her later work.