When she arrived in 1930s Paris draped in a scarlet Cardinal’s gown, teenager Leonor Fini caused an overnight sensation. The Italian-Argentine painter always refused to sign the surrealist manifesto, but her dreamlike paintings and the company she kept, including Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, put her firmly in that camp. A close friend of Picasso and Cartier-Bresson (his photograph of her nude in a swimming pool fetched a fortune at auction recently) she later worked with Elsa Schiaperelli, and famously illustrated Anne Desclos’s controversial erotic novel The Story of O. Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini is published by Vendome.