Therese Lessore

Therese Lessore (1884-1945) was a French origin painter born in Brighton. Her first husband was Bernard William Audenay (1876-1966), a leading member of the Bloomsbury group. She became the third wife of the English Impressionist painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942) in 1926.

Therese was daughter and sister of artists and studied art at the Slade. Her favourite themes were landscapes, interiors, and circus scenes.

Walter Sickert said of her work.

'But here again the greater personalities escape from classification. We may register and enroll 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 I cannot see her pictures going out of date.'