Painter and designer, born in Ashford, Kent, who aged 17 went to Paris to study art, mainly at Atelier Colarossi, with Lucien Simon and at École des Beaux-Arts, later with Léon Bakst in St Petersburg and with Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art. In 1907 in Russia she married the artist Vladimir Polunin (pronounced Poloonin), they moved to England and in 1918 she joined her husband in his work for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. She produced portraits of Diaghilev and of the singer Chaliapin. During this period of collaboration with Braque, Derain, Picasso and others her outlook broadened, and she wrote that “about 1924, it was with new enthusiasm” she “restarted her own work in portraiture and landscape.” In 1933 Polunin designed the scenery and costumes for The Snow Maiden at Sadler’s Wells and some of her other designs were bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum.