Lore Feldberg-Eber was born to upper-middle-class Jewish parents in Hamburg, Germany in 1885; she trained in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, and joined and exhibited with the progressive Hamburg Secession. In 1938 she fled to England with her family to escape Nazi persecution, leaving behind her entire body of work. She lived in Cambridge and later in London and continued to paint and teach but was never to recover the reputation she had held in pre-war Germany.
Painter Lore Feldberg-Eber was born Eleanore Feldberg to upper middle-class Jewish parents, Amalie and Emil Daniel Feldberg, in Hamburg, Germany in 1885; the family owned the well-known Gebrüder Feldberg ladies clothing store in Mönckebergstraße. At the age of 19, Feldberg began her artistic training at Gerda Koppel's Art School in Hamburg, where her teachers Franz Nölken, Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann and Paul Kayser, who had all spent time in Paris, were influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir. In 1917, Feldberg attended the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Munich and then studied for a further two years in Berlin at the women's art school founded by Dora Hitz. From 1919 on she worked as a freelance artist in Hamburg, joining the Hamburg Secession, an association of artists experimenting with new and freer styles of painting. She was also a member of the Deutscher Kuenstlerbund [German Artists' Association], Hamburgische Künstlerschaft [Hamburg Artists' Association] and Altonaer Künstlerverein [Altona Artists' Association]. In 1921, she married Moritz Eber, a Hamburg businessman. She continued to paint in a style influenced by Post-Impressionism and her work was shown at numerous exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin, often alongside that of fellow members of the Hamburg Secession. In 1927, Moritz bought a property in the village of Blankenese, near Hamburg, and commissioned Bauhaus architect Karl Schneider to renovate a thatched farmer's cottage on the land, then, later, to build a modern studio for Lore, where the couple lived with their three daughters. After 1933, their home became a gathering place for artists from the by then disbanded Hamburg Secession including Ahlers-Hestermann, Paul Kayser, Alma del Banco, Willem Grimm, Kurt Löwengard, Erich Hartmann and Ivo Hauptmann. In 1934 Feldberg-Eber's work was included in the London exhibition at Parson's Gallery, mounted by German refugee dealer Carl Braunschweig, comprising 221 works by 86 contemporary German-Jewish artists (one-third of them women); her work was also shown at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London in 1936. She continued to paint after the Nazis took power, exhibiting after 1935 at the Jewish Museum of Franz Landsberger and at the Jewish Kulturbund in Hamburg, but during the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 November 1938, an exhibition of her watercolours from Italy, in Hartungstrasse, was destroyed and in December the same year, the family fled to England. They were forced to leave all their possessions behind, including Feldberg-Eber's entire body of work. Many of their close relatives and friends, trapped in Germany, were killed, imprisoned in concentration camps or committed suicide. Years later, one Blankenese neighbour recalled witnessing Nazi soldiers drive up to Feldberg-Eber's studio, pile her paintings into a truck and drive away; the works were never recovered.
After being sponsored by her brother Wilhelm Feldberg, lecturer in Physiology at Cambridge University (subsequently a member of the Royal Society (1947) and a CBE recipient in 1963), Feldberg-Eber moved to Cambridge with her daughters. They lived in a small flat over a newsagents', where she continued to paint, and also took in another German-Jewish refugee, Eva Jungmann (later Crawley), who was evacuated from London and shared a bedroom with one of her daughters. Moritz was interned on the Isle of Man for three years as an 'enemy alien' and after release, worked in a munitions factory near Welwyn Garden City, between Cambridge and London, visiting home at weekends (an accomplished amateur violinist, he was the lead second violin in the Garden City orchestra). Meanwhile, Feldberg-Eber continued to paint portraits of students, fellow refugees and the children of local English families, and local landscapes, as well as giving art classes at a girl's boarding school and at Cambridge University's School of Architecture. After the war, the family moved to a large house at 29 Cholmeley Crescent, Highgate, London and Feldberg-Eber occasionally participated in mixed exhibitions including the 1948 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and the 1957 exhibition of Foreign Artists in Britain at the Hammersmith Art Gallery, but she was never to recover the reputation she had held in pre-war Germany, despite reconnecting with other Hamburg artists who had managed to escape from Germany: Erich Kahn, Maria Wolff and former secessionists Paul Henle and Hilde and Paul Hamann, whose life drawing sessions she regularly joined. She also regularly travelled to Southern Europe and continued to paint and draw until the end of her life, despite several strokes which impeded her control over her brushes and pencils. She died on 27 September 1966 at her home in Highgate, London. Her work is not represented in UK public collections but can be found in museums in Hamburg and Rendsburg in Germany.