Clea, the Alexandrian woman who inspired the character of the same name in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, was a painter called Clea Badaro.
Clea spoke of the day that
Durrell was first brought round to her studio, and though she hated it when
people dropped in unexpectedly, she put aside her annoyance when he showed an
interest in her work, her paintings of soldiers at the bars and cabarets around
town, of harlequins, clowns and circus women on horseback, and she remembered
also how he was fascinated by her name.
'Clea, the gentle, loveable, unknowable
Clea', is how Durrell introduces her in the
Quartet, 'so disarmingly simple, graceful, self-contained ... poured, while
still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born
without instincts or desires'.
Since her childhood, when she first began to draw, Clea recorded her impressions on almost every piece of paper that came to hand, in school copybooks, on house accounts, in the margins of letters to her friends, stimulated not only by what she saw about her but also by her dreams.
This is one of Clea's sketches, characters from a circus.
