Lydia Corbett (née Sylvette David) b. 1934

Lydia Corbett, née Sylvette David was born in Paris in 1934 to an influential art dealer based in the Champs Elysees, and his wife, an artist. She was brought up on the Île du Levant, a small Mediterranean island near the French riviera. Between the wars the coast from Collioure to Saint-Tropez had become a destination and cultural community for painters. Picasso in his studio at the château Grimaldi had created art throughout the summer of 1946 culminating in painting La Joie de Vivre. Corbett has assimilated her own experience of the light of the Côte d’Azur, into her paintings. At the age of nineteen Lydia had moved to Vallauris in the south of France with her mother who worked at a pottery studio in the town. It was here that she met Pablo Picasso in 1954.

‘Picasso was a comic, he liked laughing and joking and behaving like a bit of a clown – a clever one.’ ‘I love to paint figures quickly. He taught me a lot without saying a word’. She would sit for him in an armchair while Picasso painted her in his simple studio, surrounded by many of his own pots. Picasso gave Lydia a huge amount of confidence in herself as a painter, although it was not until she was in her forties that she started to paint, once her children had grown up. Lydia Corbett, was the subject of more than seventy paintings and sculptures by Picasso. Our understanding of Picasso’s great portraits of Sylvette, is enlivened and enriched by this exchange with the muse turned artist.

Corbett moved from Paris to England in 1968 where she pursued her own painting career, presenting fourteen solo exhibitions in London. In 1991 she exhibited in Japan, and in the USA in 2004. In 2014 an exhibition of her watercolours were shown at Theater Bremen, concurrently with a major exhibition of Picasso’s work inspired by her, ‘Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette’ held at the Kunsthalle Bremen. These two exhibitions were the subject of a film produced by ARTE broadcast in England and Germany.

Solo exhibitions with David Simon Contemporary 2016, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and in 2024 to celebrate Lydia Corbett’s 90^th birthday and to mark 70 years since she sat for Picasso in 1954. Next exhibition Spring 2026. Lydia Corbett’s paintings are in the permanent collections of Musée National Picasso, Paris, the Vatican Collection and FAMM, Mougins.