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.
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, 2024, and 2027. Lydia Corbett’s paintings are in the permanent collections of Musée National Picasso, Paris, the Vatican Collection and FAMM, Mougins.
