Daphne Warburg Astor obituary: artist and poetry editor (2024)

Daphne Warburg Astor may have borne the names of two of the wealthiest families in American history, but she wore the pedigree lightly. Her disarmingly unconventional style was wedded to an expression of wryly amused detachment, perhaps derived in part from the fact she was an American by birth domiciled in rural England.

She had moved across permanently in 1979, at the time of her second marriage, to Micky Astor — a scion of the English branch of the Astor family, and grandson of the Virginian-born society hostess Nancy Astor, who became the first female MP to take her seat in parliament. Daphne and Micky adopted three children and settled at Hatley Park, in Cambridgeshire, a Georgian mansion with 1,800 acres of land.

If asked, “What do you do?”, she would invariably respond, “I’m a farmer” — which would take some people by surprise, as this small blonde American neither looked nor sounded like the average English agricultural worker. But Astor took her responsibilities on the estate seriously, her conversation as likely to include references to the harvest or season, as to the latest avant-garde poetry pamphlet.

She was born in New York in 1949. Her father was Edward “Eddie” Warburg, a prominent philanthropist, collector and patron of the arts who co-founded the American Ballet and the School of American Ballet, and donated many works to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her paternal grandmother was a Schiff — probably an even wealthier family than the Warburgs.

Meanwhile her mother, Mary, came from a far humbler background: her family had travelled by wagon from Virginia to New Mexico and Texas, in hopes of finding oil. “They never found a drop,” Astor would remark, and had to deal instead with gangs of cattle and sheep raiders at their ranches, including on one occasion a gang led by Pancho Villa.

As young children, her mother and aunt were taught how to pull the triggers on shotguns wedged in the windows of their homestead. “My grandmother could split a match at 50 paces with a pistol,” Astor recalled. “I am from pistol-toting, risk-taking independent-woman stock.”

Her mother and aunt ran away to New York as teenagers, where they pitched up at the offices of Vogue and were promptly hired as models. After a failed marriage to an artist at the age of 17, Astor’s mother met and married Eddie Warburg. Their only daughter Daphne was brought up in the kind of gilded milieu that might be expected of such a dynasty. After attending Brearley School in New York City, she went on to Foxcroft in Virginia, another exclusive all-girls institution.

The school was known for its equestrian facilities and Astor became an excellent horsewoman. This inspired a full-page cartoon in The New Yorker in 1962 that depicted a rich couple inside their drawing room, the mother remarking of a young girl on horseback riding across the lawn: “Why, it’s Daphne — home from Foxcroft.”

The reality was that Astor rarely talked of her parents, to whom she always felt distant. She was effectively brought up by an Irish nanny. Perhaps the most important relationship in her youth was with Stephen Currier, her mother’s son by her first marriage. He was 20 years older and became something of a father figure. Currier and his wife lived at Kinloch Farm, Virginia, not far from Astor’s boarding school, and from about the age of six she spent weekends and holidays there.

In 1967, however, disaster struck when the air-taxi in which Currier and his wife were travelling crashed in the Caribbean Sea (they were civil rights activists and Astor always suspected that it was no accident). They left three children under the age of 11 and Astor — who was 17 — felt it was her duty to become a (non-legal) guardian, though this was made difficult for her by the Curriers’ executors. Her room at Kinloch was taken away, the nanny fired and her horse sold.

Constant travel was a theme of her life as a young woman. At 18 she went to Ghana with the Peace Corps, helping to build houses, where she became seriously ill and was hospitalised. When she and a friend were visiting Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, they were robbed of all their possessions. Desperate and with no money, they knocked on the door of a house they knew was owned by a British couple. And so she unexpectedly found herself staying with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor for two weeks. Contrary to their volatile reputations, the stars were the epitome of kindness.

Astor wanted to go to film school but her parents did not support her in this ambition, envisaging a society wedding instead. She had a small trust fund, but if pressed Astor would always point out that she had to work for a living (latterly she took up knitting, selling the products in Cambridge to raise money for causes). She funded her time at film school, where Martin Scorsese was a contemporary, with a variety of jobs, including cooking — or making sandwiches — for the artist Philip Guston and sourcing pieces of scrap and rubbish for the sculptor Louise Nevelson to use in her work. Astor acquired an undeveloped loft in SoHo, which she shared with a variety of cats and dogs, most of them strays she had picked up at night on the streets; her black labrador, Boozer, became well known on the New York art scene.

She was unable to complete her film studies due to a lack of funds and an unwillingness to ask her family for money. Instead she rented out her city apartment and bought a small piece of land in the Catskill mountains, near Woodstock. Here she lived in a tent and in a borrowed potting shed for 18 months, accompanied by her animals, growing vegetables and getting involved in the local hippie scene. She earned some money by means of odd jobs for local artists, including doing the shopping for the sculptor Raoul Hague. A striking blonde with azure eyes and a softly cadenced voice, Astor had no particular interest in her clothes or appearance at this time. Friends who encountered her in New York noticed that she was still wearing some of her old school uniform.

By 1970 Astor had a new career as a photographer. She worked for Newsweek, The New York Times and National Geographic, travelling across the US on assignments. She was briefly married to Charlie Baum — son of Joe Baum, the restaurateur who restored New York’s Rainbow Room. After her divorce, Astor embarked on travels around Australia and the Far East. In Japan, she spent three months living in silence as the only woman in a Zen Buddhist monastery. Some 30 years later, Astor encountered the abbot, who told her that while she had been very welcome, none of the monks had had any idea why she was there.

The interest in Buddhism deepened and she travelled in India, and became acquainted with the Dalai Lama and his chief English translator, Thupten Jinpa, who lodged in her home for two years when he was studying at Cambridge. The painter Maggi Hambling, one of Astor’s closest friends, recalled that when she mentioned she was going to stay near Toulouse, Astor observed: “It’s very muddy there.” It transpired that she had once visited the area with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Dalai Lama. “I lent Bresson my gumboots,” she recalled. “But the Dalai Lama just sort of floated along.”

Astor enjoyed her life on the estate in England and had no qualms about taking full British citizenship, though she never lost her accent (it amused her that people would often inquire whether she was “over on holiday”). Several of the rooms in the house were designed for entertaining on a grand scale, but this was not Astor’s style: she converted one of the drawing rooms into an art studio (her own drawings and prints were occasionally exhibited). Another slightly unusual feature of the house was the lift — installed by a previous generation so that a decrepit butler might be kept on. When it was time for Astor and her guests to go upstairs to bed, everyone would squeeze in to the lift together.

Her husband Micky, a fund manager and farmer, survives her along with their children Jessica, a child sleep therapist, Luke, a musician, and Eloise, an events manager. A brother, David, also survives her.

Over more than four decades, Astor made a significant contribution to the arts in England and especially in East Anglia. She was involved in governance and fundraising at Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and played an active role in the establishment of the Cambridge Literary Festival in 2014. When the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival collapsed, having lost its funding in 2015, she instigated its “handmade” successor, Poetry in Aldeburgh.

As a poetry editor, Astor co-launched the online poetry magazine Here/There. This was followed by Hazel Press, a vibrant imprint specialising in volumes on nature themes by leading poets including Matthew Hollis, Ella Duffy and Ruth Padel, printed on local recycled paper using vegetable inks.

Astor trained in poetry at the Faber Academy and continued her practice with the Lamb Poets group, meeting every other week in a room in a pub on Lamb’s Conduit Street, London. She had a preference for cowboy boots that jangled as she walked, meaning she could always be heard going up the stairs. Her own poetry was lyrical-documentary in style, often taking the natural world as its subject matter. Unusually for a poet, she hated metaphors, insisting: “Something is not like something, it is something.”

This was reflected in her conversational style: she tended to make pithy, spontaneous and sometimes startling statements, such as: “Honestly, I think the only thing I should have done in my life is pick and juice apples.”

Daphne Warburg Astor, artist, poet and curator, was born on December 22, 1949. She died of cancer on July 14, 2024, aged 74