Biography
John Lessore (b. London, UK 1939), the nephew of Walter Sickert, studied at the Slade School of Art under Thomas Monnington (1902-1976). In 1961 he was awarded an Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship and went to Italy. He also travelled to France, where he met his French-born wife, and where he acquired a house. In 1965 he held his first exhibition at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London, founded by his father, Frederick Lessore (1879-1951) and from 1953, continued by his mother, Helen Lessore (1907-1994), whose single-mindedness in championing figurative artists such as Aitchison, Auerbach, Bacon, Camp and Uglow was legendary. In 1966, he started part-time teaching at the Royal Academy Schools and where he put into practice his belief in the necessity of teaching good life-drawing from a binocular rather than monocular approach, involving the study of volume, movement and anatomy.
