Lélia Pissarro was born into a Jewish family in Paris, France in 1963, the third and youngest child of artist Hugues Claude Pissarro and his first wife Katia, an art dealer, while her interest in drawing and painting was nurtured by her grandfather Paulémile (the youngest son of Camille Pissarro. In 1988 she moved to London, exhibiting frequently in the UK and internationally, her work evolving gradually from a more traditional Post-Impressionist technique towards a more contemporary style, embracing abstraction and minimalism.
Painter Lélia Pissarro was born into a Jewish family in Paris, France on 27 July 1963, the third and youngest child of the artist Hugues Claude Pissarro and his first wife Katia, an art dealer. She was brought up, until the age of 11, by her grandparents in Clécy, Normandy, and also lived with her brother Joachim Pissarro, an art historian. There her interest in drawing and painting was nurtured by her grandfather Paulémile (the youngest son of Camille Pissarro), who taught her the fundamentals of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques. As a girl, she lived with Paulémile for some years due to her father's impoverished circumstances. Lélia Pissarro later recalled that he taught her how to sign her name on the canvas before she learnt how to write and that ‘When I was nine he started showing me how to draw. He taught me the seasons. He taught me the exact colour of the trees in spring and of snow in winter. He used to tell me how proud of me Camille would have been’ (The Observer 1993, p. 60). Pissarro held her first exhibition at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, subsequently taking part in an exhibition at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. When she returned to her parents in Paris, her father tutored her until she enrolled at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the city in the 1980s. She later taught art at the Moria School and studied oil painting restoration at the Louvre's in-house laboratory. At this time she held solo exhibitions in Paris, Lyon, Mulhouse and Rennes.
In 1988 Pissarro moved to London and in the same year participated in the international touring exhibition Pissarro: The Four Generations. Barry Fealdman, art critic of the Jewish Chronicle (and secretary at Ben Uri) noted that ‘Her delicate unaffected paintings, though lacking in zest, have an undeniable charm of their own’ (Fealdman 1993, p. 30). She has since exhibited frequently both in the UK and internationally, often with Ben Uri, having moved gradually from a traditional Post-Impressionist technique towards a more contemporary style, embracing abstraction and minimalism, as exemplified by her series Circles, Shoes (an example of which is in the Ben Uri Collection) and Animals. She has also developed innovative techniques, incorporating new materials in her work, such as gold, wax and encaustic.
Alongside her father and the French-born artist, Lauren Brio, in 1999 she co-founded Sorteval Press, a group of artists dedicated to developing techniques in etching and printmaking. The group was named after H. Claude's home in Normandy, where the printmaking was carried out. In the same year, their first exhibition took place at the Mall Galleries in London. The etchings she contributed recalled her great-grandfather’s subjectmatter, including snow scenes, haystacks and market places. Like Camille, who recorded the lives of the peasants among whom he lived, especially the young women, Lélia Pissarro portrayed peasant women at market, feeding animals or washing clothes in the river. The Jewish Chronicle observed that ‘Like Camille, she does not like to dwell on the hard grind of living and working in the country, preferring instead to produce an idealised, but utterly charming picture of life on the land […] The etchings are small-scale and, in the Impressionist tradition, are made up of tiny lines that recall the brushstrokes of Camille’ (Weiner 1999, p. 37).
Lélia Pissarro is married to the art dealer David Stern, with whom she co-founded the Stern Pissarro Gallery, now located in London's St James's, where she has held numerous exhibitions, among them Four Seasons of the Mind - A Series of Snow Paintings (2004). The 40 paintings, drawings and watercolours were inspired by a photograph that her grandfather had taken in the 1950s, showing two houses under snow in the Normandy village where Pissarro spent her childhood. In the exhibition catalogue, Pissarro urged critics not to compare these works with the series of paintings of a single subject produced by both her great-grandfather and by Monet, as there were far more differences than similarities between her works and those of the two Impressionists. Unlike Paulémile, who favoured working outdoors, she preferred working in her studio, using the photograph and her imagination as guides in rendering her subject. Rather than trying to capture transient effects of weather and light, her paintings strove to depict different moods and emotions. Among others, the Jewish Chronicle art critic Julia Weiner singled out the painting Summer, ‘in which the snow appears fiery red and flame orange, with the paint applied in an almost abstract fashion on the walls of the houses’ (Weiner 2004, p. 17). Lélia Pissarro currently lives and works in London. Her work is represented in the UK public domain in the Ben Uri Collection. In 2020 her work featured in Ben Uri's online exhibition, Interstices - Discovering the Ben Uri Collection: Guest curated by René Gimpel.
Lélia Pissarro in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lélia Pissarro]
Publications related to [Lélia Pissarro] in the Ben Uri Library