WHEN Barbara Kaczmarowska Hamilton drew the Duchess of York, she discovered her sitter was an artist. First the Duchess photographed the initial sketch by Basha, as she’s known to her friends. Then the Duchess revealed that she daubs cityscapes, has a painting teacher, and hangs her work on the walls at Romenda Lodge. Basha had a quick private view of the Duchess’s watercolours and thought them exceedingly good.

Later they spoke to the director of the Accademia Italiana, and the Duchess was told that the Accademia wants to exhibit her work when she’s completed a few more paintings. ‘The Duchess doesn’t talk about her paintings because she doesn’t think they’re very good,’ says Basha enthusiastically, in her Polish accent.

Basha is the society portrait pasteller de nos jours and divides her working time between Palm Beach, Jamaica and London. Her sitters include Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Norman Parkinson, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mohammed Al Fayed, the Sultan of Brunei, Denis and Carol Thatcher, the Marquess of Bath, Professor Norman Stone and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Her finished subjects have enormous eyes with faraway looks in them, flattering cheekbones, swirly hair and romantic airs. Even Sir Clive Sinclair looks attractive.

RECENTLY Basha had an Accademia Italiana exhibition in which a study of the Duchess and a conversation piece with her daughters made the headlines. The newspapers claimed the Duchess intended to give the latter to her estranged husband to commemorate their first meeting at Royal Ascot nine years ago. ‘It’s not for Andrew,’ says Basha. ‘Why should she give it to him when she likes it?’ The paintings were a gift – normally she charges £3,500 a portrait – from Basha to the Duchess.

She often dashes her portraits off in two and half hours – ‘If I’m in a good mood, I’m all excited like a tiger …’ And she has a facility for likeness, according to fellow artist, the Marquess of Bath. ‘In Polish we have an expression for that. We say I have ‘monkey ability’.’ She’s a delightful, exuberant ingenue, and speaks in parentheses, her conversation darting everywhere excitedly. Life imitates art because she looks a decade younger than her 45 years, and she wears a classic pistachio suit, glasses and an antique gold link bracelet.

She had a subject who loved her portrait so much that she went to the bank, got out all her jewellery and told Basha to choose whatever she wanted. Basha selected the link bracelet.

We’re talking in her South Kensington studio where she comes three days a week and prefers her sitters to sit. There are gilt-framed portraits everywhere, pop music playing and a photograph signed ‘with all good wishes’ from Lady Thatcher on the mantelpiece. A jocular portrait of Norman Parkinson hangs in the bathroom. ‘I met him at a ball and in his jacket he had a silver book of photographs. I thought, ‘How funny, he’s a famous photographer and he’s still showing his work around and needing compliments.”

Basha has captured Prince Michael as well. ‘I had an exhibition two years ago in the Polish Club and he saw a magazine picture of one of the portraits, of someone he knew,’ she says. ‘So he went off to the Polish Club by himself. Nobody recognised him, nobody said ‘hello’, nobody took his coat, that’s terribly funny, no? Then his secretary called me and said he needed a Masonic portrait. So they commissioned me to do him in Masonic clothes and he liked it so much that he sent it out printed on his Christmas cards.’ What was the Prince like to draw? ‘He has an exceptionally good face to paint, he’s like a Czar and very jolly and good humoured.’ Basha became a society portrait painter unintentionally. She was born in Sopot, went to the Academy of Art in Gdansk and left Poland when she was 24 to study in Venice.

‘It’s not a fantastic story about defecting and being tortured. I just left on holiday and didn’t return.’ In Italy she held an exhibition of her abstract paintings and one portrait. ‘Everybody came to the portrait and said, ‘Gosh, if you can paint like that, why do you do those?” NOWADAYS she doesn’t lead a socially strenuous life and is surprised to find herself in the newspapers. She married late, aged 37, to Ian Hamilton, whose great uncle was the general Sir Ian Hamilton of Gallipoli fame. She had her first child when she was 38 and they live in a 1950s house overlooking Watership Down where Ian, she says, is rich and Scottish, wears a cap, wellies, plants trees and doesn’t work. They spend much of the year in Jamaica where Ian’s family used to have sugar plantations. And they go to Palm Beach. ‘I hadn’t even heard of it before.’ She laughs and creases her nose. ‘In Poland, Palm Beach isn’t very popular.’

I look around the studio again. There hangs Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘One of the most classical heads one can see nowadays and a picturesque character.’ And a picture of Rula Lenska: ‘Usually she hangs in the Polish Club. It’s nice that people can sit and have lunch under pictures of themselves.’

Nearby is a dashing one of the Marquess of Bath: ‘One of London’s most extraordinary characters.’ And one of the Duke of Kent: ‘I don’t think I got him quite right. He’s not someone you can easily get to know. He’s composed, closed and charming.’

It’s sad the walls don’t have ears. Basha says she’s like a shrink to her sitters. ‘I’m always surprised. It’s like an hour of truth,’ she explains. ‘They have big trust, tell me everything and then I forget. Often extremely personal things. A pose is like a marriage for life, it’s very psychological and special.’ Did the Duchess talk to her about her personal problems? ‘I can’t say anything.’ But Basha, who imagined the Duchess as a ‘crazy bully and careless character’ before she met her, found her a sensitive, wonderful and powerful personality.