Ada Flatto was born into a Jewish family in Łódź, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, then in the Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1896 and immigrated to England with her family in 1902. She showed an early gift for art and during her twenties, spent two years with an art studio in Berlin; returning to London, she studied under Bernard Meninsky. Painting in oils and later taking up sculpting, she specialised in portraiture and painting the human figure.
Painter and sculptor Ada Flatto was born in Łódź, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, then in the Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1896, into a Jewish family. She was the daughter of Dvora and Sucher Jontef Flatto, a lace importer who was also a Talmudic scholar.
With her mother and three of her siblings (her eldest sister, Celia, became the mother of renowned mathematician and historian Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), author of the prize-winning 1970s TV series The Ascent of Man), she left Łódź in 1902 to join her brother Max in London. Max had left his homeland to avoid conscription into the Russian army and established a haberdashery on Commercial Street in London's Jewish East End ghetto. Flatto showed an early gift for art and during her twenties, spent two years with an art studio in Berlin, before returning to London to study under Jewish painter Bernard Meninsky at Westminster School of Art. In 1926 she married jeweller Max Steinfeld with whom she had two daughters who became musicians. Painting in oils, Flatto specialised in portraiture and the human figure, striving always, as her Jewish Chronicle obituary noted, 'to capture something of their character on canvas' (Jewish Chronicle 1994, p. 21). She exhibited regularly under her maiden name, primarily in Jewish and East End contexts. In 1934 she participated in the annual East End Academy show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, when her work was singled out by the Times which noted: ‘Miss Ada Flatto has clearly the making of a good painter. Her Sketch of a reclining girl, foreshortened, shows ability, and her Head Studyhas something of the directness of Greco-Roman encaustic portraits’ (The Times 1936, p. 9).
Flatto also showed with Ben Uri from 1936 until the 1970s. Notable group shows at Ben Uri included The Artist: Self-Portrait and Environment (1951) and the Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists (1956), celebrating 300 years since the re-admittance of Jews into England under Oliver Cromwell. She also showed at the Toynbee Art Club at Toynbee Hall in the East End and with the Islington Art Circle. She received enthusiastic reviews in Art News and Review, the publication founded by Ben Uri patron Dr Richard Gainsborough: 'Her pictures have a direct apprehension of form and display an uninhibited use of the medium', he wrote. She won first prize and critical acclaim in a London competition with her portrait Frances, depicting an elderly woman. Her talent matured with age and experience. She held a first, well-received, solo show at the Queenswood Gallery in Highgate in 1961, when she was over 70. The Jewish Chronicle art critic Peter Stone praised in particular her penetrative self-portraits, her sensitive studies of musicians and her chess players conveying ‘concentration’, concluding that ‘the best of her small pictures have freedom, good colour, and intimacy’ (Stone 1961, p. 31). Flatto continued painting until the age of 88. When her hands became too unsteady to manage fine brushwork, she took up sculpture, which she continued to enjoy until well into her 90s. Ada Flatto died in London, England on 22 September 1994. A posthumous exhibition featuring over 70 of her oils was held at the Bishopsgate Institute in 1997. Flatto's work is not currently represented in UK public collections.