Painter, draughtsman, designer and printmaker Stella Steyn studied at the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin and the Académie Scandinave and L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, meeting writer James Joyce, tutoring his daughter, Lucia, and producing etchings to illustrate Finnegans Wake (published in Transition, 1929). She also studied in Stuttgart and at the Bauhaus, Dessau (1931–2), but remained more closely affiliated to the School of Paris, despite seating her boldly coloured, flatly painted woman in a red hat upon a Gerhard Rietveld Bauhaus chair. In 1953 her painting of a nude girl holding a bunch of flowers aroused controversy at the WIAC’s touring exhibition in Stourbridge and after being deemed unsuitable for children, its face was turned to the wall for the duration of the show.