The Artist's Beard

'Portrait of Lyton Strachey' painted in 1916  by Dora Carrington (1893-1932). Strachey and Carrington were well known for how one of them was was a lesbian and the other was gay, and yet how close to each other they were, emotionally. In modern parlance a 'beard' is not just the physical artefact grown by a man, but it is also the name given to a person of the opposite gender who provides cover for a man's sexual non-conformism. In this example of a shared life they were surely beards for each other.