Men and Women with Baskets

Thérèse Lessore grew up in an artistic family; her father (Jules Lessore) was a painter, and her grandfather (Emile Lessore) worked on porcelain at Wedgwood in the 1860s. Lessore painted scenes of ordinary life and everyday subjects. She exhibited her work in many avant-garde group exhibitions early in her career and was a founder member of the radical London Group in 1913. Lessore also exhibited with the New English Art Club, and at the Beaux Arts, Goupil and Lefevre Galleries, all in London, as well as the London Salon and the Society of Women Artists. Lessore held her first solo show at the Eldon Gallery, London in 1918. She exhibited widely, in group and solo shows, in the years that followed until 1938. A memorial exhibition was held in 1946 at the Leicester Galleries following Lessore's death in 1945. Lessore attended the Slade School of Fine Art between 1904-1909. She was taught there by Walter Sickert (1860-1942), who she later married in 1926. When Sickert became older, he relied on Lessore for squaring up, underpainting, and later overprinting his canvases. Lessore spent less time on her own work as a result and she became his sole carer in the early 1940s, nursing him until his death in 1942.