When she was 21, painter Frances Bell was living “in the boot of [her] car” scraping by on £10,000 a year. “All the stereotypes about starving in a garret tend to be true,” she says of an artist's early career.
By then, she had completed a course at Charles H Cecil Studios in Florence, which was “small”, “very intensive” and “nothing like a modern university" – more similar to “17th-century training: all about repetition, rigour”.
