Biographies

Thérèse Lessore (1884 – 1945) She studied at the Slade and painted landscapes, interiors, and circus scenes. Her father and brother were also artists. She became third wife in 1926. In that connection it is interesting to see what Sickert said of her work in 1914: Walter Sickert’s But here again the greater personalities escape from classification. We may register and enrol as we please the work of Therese Lessore ; she will always appear to be the most interesting and masterful personality of them all. She seems to me to have the merits that all the groups would like to claim. First and foremost, she has human interest, without which art on this planet probably cannot exist. Her pictures are seemingly not painted from models pretending to do certain things. By some strange alchemy of genius, the essentials of their being and movement are torn from them, and presented in ordered and rhythmical arrangement of the highest technical brevity and beauty. She seems to have no parti pris like John, of a certain processional solemnity, or like Henry Lamb or Stanley Spencer, of a certain fateful strangeness, only perhaps a point of cold and not unkindly malice. I cannot see her pictures going out of date. . (NA 15.4:83)