Portrait of Poppet, the artist's daughter, in a black hat

Born in 1912, Poppet was the eldest daughter of Augustus and Dorelia John. Originally named Elizabeth Ann or Lizzie, she was nicknamed Poppet when Caspar, one of her half-brothers, gazing at the newly-arrived baby exclaimed, 'What a little poppet!'. David Herbert wrote in his autobiography that she grew up to be 'extremely attractive, she had almost as many boyfriends as her father had mistresses' (D. Herbert, Second Son, London, 1973, p. 61). She married three times, first in 1931, to the atomic physicist Derek Jackson, then to Villiers Bergne and finally to Willem Pol, a Dutch artist who had endured the atrocities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia. His daughter Talitha studied acting (landing a small part in Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra) and became a style icon in the late 1960s after marrying the oil heir and future philanthropist Sir Paul Getty. She lived her short adult life between London, Rome and Marrakesh and after her death in 1971 her son Tara Getty (b. 1968) was raised by Poppet and Willem Pol at their home in the South of France. Poppet died in 1997.