A former South Hams schoolgirl has told the story of Picasso’s famous muse – the iconic ‘girl with the ponytail’ – who just happens to be her mum.

For a few months in France in 1954, a beautiful 17-year-old girl crossed the path of the country’s greatest artist Picasso – and she became subject of his Sylvette series of more than 60 portraits, drawings and sculptures.

Today the girl with the ponytail, Lydia Corbett, now in her 80s and living in South Brent, is one of the few of Pablo Picasso sitters still alive.

Her eldest daughter, Isabel Coulton, has just completed a book about the life of her mum and how she became one of the most famous models of one of the world’s most famous artists.

The former King Edward VI Community College pupil, who just like her mother is an artist in her own right, took five years to write the book – I was Sylvette: The Story of Lydia Corbett – drawing on her mum’s memories and her own family knowledge.

The book, illustrated with work by Lydia and Isabel as well as photos from the family album, tells of the places and people in her life, both after 1954 and, just as fascinating, before as Lydia spent her early childhood on the Île du Levant off the Côte d’Azur, notorious as a nudist colony, where her English grandfather, an unlikely clergyman who won the DSO and MC in the First World War, had built three houses.

By 1942, the family were forced to flee to an extraordinary community in the hills on the mainland, a refuge from the Germans and a resort of the local Resistance.

Lydia completed her education at the archetypal child-centred experimental school, Summerhill, in Suffolk.

That meeting with Picasso has ensured her a place in history as the artists work and her portrayal with the ponytail and long skirt became synonymous with the 1950s and allegedly even inspired the look of French film star Brigitte Bardot.

Isabel, who is married with three children, also lives in South Brent.

She explained she had been five years putting the book together but began working on it in earnest from February this year.

Ask why she had written the book she explained: ‘Well, Lydia is the one who needed to tell the story, and she asked various friends to help out and write it, but it wasn’t that easy.  

‘I have lived near Lydia for around 23 years, since my eldest son was born and I watched her getting more and more frustrated.  It dawned on me that I already know most of the story, I know how mum talks and thinks, I know Provence and so it just seemed natural that I should do it.  

‘Luckily I had no idea what I was taking on, ignorance is often a great help and Lydia somehow always manages to get what she wants.  It has actually been a wonderful thing to do.  

‘I have enjoyed the conversations we have had together which invariably went off at tangents onto all subjects and it has been an interesting challenge in many ways, I have learnt so much.  I have also discovered I really like writing.  So I am grateful to have done it.’

On the subject of her mum’s Picasso claim to fame she added: ‘I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t a part of our life.  

‘It was a story I knew about and accepted, as if everybody had had a Picasso moment in their lives.  

‘I was always surprised when people looked shocked if the story happened to pop out accidentally, and I remember a school teacher telling me off for telling such terrible lies.’

The book published by Endeavour London Ltd is on sale in hardback from October 1.