Breaking into the modelling industry in Britain and the rest of Europe has always been difficult for women of colour. But despite the challenges, there have always been black women pretty enough and spirited enough to make it through. One such was Jamaican Beverley Heath. After having long retired from professional modelling, she hit the newspapers again in Britain this week. Her husband and long-time partner, John Hoyland, died and she was featured in all the obituaries. Although not well known to the general public, Hoyland was known as one of the greatest abstract painters of his generation and Beverley was his muse.

Beverley herself was born in Montego Bay in 1954. She first came to public attention in the Jamaican newspapers. As a teenager, there was a photo spread of her dressed, on one side of the page, in her school uniform, and on the other side, as a sultry young model. By 1975 she was living in London and was described by the Jamaican press as a “West-India Super Girl”. Beverley had been on the beauty queen circuit. She had won a series of titles: Miss Black Britain in 1971; Miss Caribbean Queen in 1974 and in 1975 Miss Variety Club of Great Britain. In another era she might have gone into mainstream photographic modelling. She was signed by a modelling agency in 1976 and photographs of her exist from that era. This was a generation before black super-models like Naomi Campbell, so Beverley’s career as a photographic model appeared to go nowhere; and she might have just slid into domestic obscurity.

But in the early 1980s she met the British abstract artist John Hoyland. He had been born in the grey, northern British city of Sheffield a long way from Beverley’s native Jamaica. His first wife had come from somewhere even further north than Sheffield — Finland. However, he would bemoan the dull British landscape: “Sometimes I curse my ‘Anglo-Saxonness’. I despise its dull, clod-hopping mongrelness. Perhaps that is why I cling to the exotic.” Hoyland was an “enfant terrible” of the art world, the friend of many of the most famous artistes of the day. Apart from being a dedicated artist, he was also a political radical: demonstrating against the Vietnam War; helping to edit radical publications like Black Dwarf and even engaging in a public dispute with pop star John Lennon about Lennon’s left-wing credentials.

But in 1969 Hoyland had travelled to the Caribbean with one of his artist friends. The light, colour, flora and fauna of the region seemed to “rock his world”. He was to travel there repeatedly for the rest of his career. He was quoted as saying, “If Turner (the famous British watercolourist) had ever been able to go in an aeroplane through the clouds on a flight to Jamaica, it would have really done his head in.” He marvelled at Jamaica’s “tremendous skies, the amazing colours and the sea and the foliage and the wildlife”. In the early 1970s Hoyland had been in a relationship with a jazz singer, Eloise Laws, and through her met many of the jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie. But just as the colours of the Caribbean were a lasting artistic inspiration, it was Beverley Heath who turned out to be the love of Hoyland’s life.

For the rest of his career he travelled regularly throughout the Caribbean. He went to Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Barbados and the Virgin Islands. But Jamaica was the place to which he kept returning. He and Beverley bought a villa in Montego Bay on the North Coast and spent most winters there. In 2008 Beverley and John Hoyland were married; the culmination of a long and happy relationship. Last week he died. But every obituary referred to Beverley and their relationship. From young model to artist’s muse, Beverley Heath has had a fascinating life.