Jago Eliot and his family
Shinjinee
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=484163&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=230
Nice picture of Bianca Eliot nee Ciambrellio, as well.
[excerpts]
The 40-year-old party-loving son of the eccentric 10th Earl of St
Germans, who carried the courtesy title Lord Eliot, died 17 months ago
after suffering an epileptic fit in his bath. Last night his widow
Bianca, a former model and mother of Jago's three children, insisted
the will did not mean Lord Eliot had died penniless.
"It is the way of these estates that the women never inherit," says
Bianca, 30. "Everything that was my husband's now passes to our son
Albie, who is now the heir to his grandfather."
....Jago's family are contesting a £1.5 million life insurance policy
that would have provided considerable security for his widow, twin
daughters and son.
During last year's inquest, it was revealed that traces of cocaine and
cannabis had been found in Jago's blood. Although it was ruled drugs
had played no part in his death and the coroner considered it to be
from natural causes, the insurers have refused to pay out.
>From her farmhouse home on the Port Eliot estate, Lady Eliot says: "We
are contesting this." She adds: "We are living on the estate, where we
intend to remain. My children and I are all looked after."
Last weekend - on what would have been her fifth wedding anniversary -
Bianca had all three children baptised at a local church.
Jago, a former busker, magician and surfer, married Bianca - the
stepdaughter of Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz - in "the field of
lost vagueness" at Glastonbury in 2002. A formal ceremony followed in
Port Eliot, with twins Ruby and Violet born a year later. Albert,
known as Albie, arrived in 2004.
The will shows Lord Eliot left a gross estate of £360,000. Papers at
the Winchester probate registry state that, after liabilities, there
was a net value of 'nil'.
In the will, Millfield-educated Lord Eliot states he wants his
chattels held in family trusts for his two-year-old son. He also
stipulated that, should his wife not survive him, he wanted to appoint
her mother Karen to be his children's guardian rather than his 66-year-
old, three-times-married father Peregrine.
== end of section relevant==
Information
Lord Eliot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jago_Eliot,_Lord_Eliot
Guardian obituary
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1764867,00.html
Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401828&in_page_id=1770
"Bianca, who gave her occupation to the Truro inquest as homemaker,
said she had met Jago in a Plymouth nightclub in 2000 and married in
2002.
She is an ex model and stepdaughter of the famous artist Robert
Lenkiewicz. Her husband had just finished a course in computer arts
course at Plymouth University and was about to start a job working for
the Arts Council with Hewlett Packard."
The story gives her mother's name here as Lesley Lenkiewicz.
Other sources give her name as the painter Karen Ciambriello
http://www.armada-gallery.com/index.php?artist=karenciambriello
Karen Ciambriello was born in Ohio U.S.A., her mother was an English
war bride, her father a U.S. airman. Great grandmother was a Blackfoot
Native American which explains her fascination with nature and
spiritual ideas.
Karen attended Plymouth College of Art, married, had a family and was
widowed very young.
She met Robert Lenkiewicz in 1982 when she was working on a project
about death. He painted a very moving picture of her and her children
with one empty chair for her husband. This began what has turned out
to be a very long relationship which resulted in the birth of their
children. Thais and Chaya. They and Robert, with his complex life, are
the inspiration for her work, Robert call this her 'physysic diary'.
She began academic painting with Robert Lenkiewicz but now paints in
her own humerous 'private language', observing simple events, feelings
and dreams and is indeed a very private person. Most of her work has
never been seen before.
== end of second excerpt ==
http://www.robertlenkiewicz.org/book/export/html/100
says that Karen Ciambriello was one of his lovers, not his wife. If
true, the painter was Lady Eliot's common-law stepfather only.
== third excerpt == relationship with Earl of St Germans (Bianca's
father in law) ===
St. Germans first met Lenkiewicz in the early 70s, when the painter
was at work on a 3,000 square ft mural on the outside wall of his
studio in the Barbican, featuring a cast of local characters and on
the theme, he would explain to passers-by, of the influence on Jewish
thought on Elizabethan philosophy, 1580-1620. (The mural is still
there, if much faded.)
St. Germans is the owner of Port Eliot, a stately home near Liskeard
in Cornwall, and the ancestral seat of his family for the past 600
years. Impressed by Lenkiewicz's work, St Germans invited him to
execute a mural in the largest room in the house - 'the Round Room',
which is 40ft in diameter and dates from the 18th century. Lenkiewicz
agreed, in return for St.Germans paying for a new roof for his
Barbican studio. 'I ended up paying on the rent on it for years.'
It was a commission that was to last until the painter's death. The
Round Room is one of most remarkable of all his works. Lenkiewicz
called it 'the Riddle Picture' - devising the painting as a series of
clues. It is divided into two broad themes - the Deluge/Hell, and
Paradise, executed as a riotous collage: mythical creatures and
Arcadian gardens, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a falling
Lucifer, life-size portraits of St. German's family and friends; and a
representation of the Last Supper, showing the historian A.L. Rowse (a
friend of the St. Germans family) surrounded by eleven of Lenkiewicz's
friends and lovers. (The painter himself appears in the work, holding
his own severed head).
Lenkiewicz executed compendious notes and drawings as preparation for
the painting itself. Poring over them in the library at Port Eliot,
one realises the extraordinary breadth of scholarship that he brought
to his work. There are commentaries on mediaeval myth and alchemy,
Cabalistic thought, the symbolism of Pierrot and Harlequin, pages of
studies of Raphael's technique for drawing folds in cloth, the
writings of Meister Eckhart, disquisitions on dragons, griffins and
the best way to catch a unicorn (According to Honorius of Autun,
writing in the Speculum de Mysteriis ecclesiiae' '...a virgin is put
in a field; the animal then comes to her and is caught because it lies
down in her lap.' )
Hardly any of this extraordinary body of recondite knowledge and
whimsy seems to have found its way into the painting itself, which is
so replete with symbolism that Lenkiewicz admitted that by the end
even he had completely lost sight of the answer to the riddle.
St Germans gave Lenkiewicz complete carte blanche for the subject
matter. 'My only stipulation was that it had to be decent'. It was
only some years into the work that he realised that an arrow being
fired from the bow of a mythical Knight Rider, was actually a huge
penis, apparently aimed at the exquisitely painted head of one of St.
German's friends, the writer Candida Lycett Green. 'I got him to
change it.'
Over the course of some 30 years, Lenkiewicz would turn up at
irregular intervals at Port Eliot, take occupancy of the Round Room
for a week or so, painting for 18 or 20 hours a day - neither coming
out, nor letting St Germans in - and then leave. He invariably had one
of a number of women in tow. 'Eventually I barred them', remembers St
Germans, 'because it distracted him from the painting'. For years, St
Germans was unable to use the room at all. In gentle exasperation, he
wrote to Lenkiewicz asking when the work might be completed.
Lenkiewicz replied, citing the case of Constantine Huygens who had
commissioned Rembrandt at the age of 21 and received a mere half a
dozen illustrations in return before ceasing his patronage. 'How
regrettable, he later pined, that he lacked the good sense to
encourage distractions, dilly-dallying, anything to extend the
agreement to a further 50 years and collect the Cyndips, the Jewish
Bride or Prodigal Son instead.... How fickle the failure to see the
ideal patron as one who accepts this relationship as the work of art.'
'Lenk was a charlatan', says St Germans. 'But in the best possible
sense of the word. He was just so convincing in the way he approached
life, everybody felt better for knowing him.'
=== end of third excerpt==
And the artist was apparently a bibliomaniac at the end as well! He
left at least eleven children of whom three at least were still minors
at the end. A bit like other famous painters - Augustus John, Pablo
Picasso etc.
According to Roger Wolmuth, People Weekly, v31, n3, p108(4) Jan 23,
1989, his daughter Thais was born in 1989 to girlfriend Karen
Ciambriello (mother of Bianca).