Thérèse Lessore

KT663 Thérèse Lessore (1884 – 1945) In a Belgian Train Signed and dated l.r.: Lessore/1921, watercolour over pencil, with a pencil outline, inscribed in pencil with title beneath mount l.r.: in a Belgian train Image 23 x 26.5 cm.; 9 x 10 3/8 inches, full sheet 28 x 32 cm.; 11 x 12 5/8 inches Provenance Bonhams, London, 17 November 1988, lot 27; Sandra Lumis Fine Art, London; Bernard Kelly, bought from the above, his sale at Lyon and Turnbull, London, 15 January 2025, lot 225 The artist came from an artistic family and was the daughter of the painter Jules Lessore (1849-1892) and sister of the sculptor Frederick Lessore (1879-1951). Born in Brighton, she attended the South-Western Polytechnic Art School and the Slade School of Fine Art from 1904–9, where she won the Melville Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition. She exhibited regularly at the New English Art Club and the Goupil Gallery, and had her first solo exhibition at Eldar Gallery, with a catalogue preface written by Walter Sickert. She was a founder member of The London Group, the artist-run organisation of radical painters which grew out of The Camden Town Group, where she was to exhibit regularly. Lessore was amongst the most talented female artists of The London Group. She married firstly the artist Bernard Adeney and in then 1926 she married Walter Sickert, as his third wife. He described her as “a Persian miniature”. The two artists shared a love of the music-hall and the circus which feature in both their work. Her contributions to exhibitions at The London Group were fewer after her marriage to Sickert who was 24 years her senior and for whom she cared and acted as his artist’s assistant. This acutely observed watercolour of two fellow passengers observed by the artist in Belgium a few years after the end of WWI verges on caricature.