Alison Debenham

Alison Edith Le Plat (née Debenham; 18 February 1903 – 24 November 1967) was a British painter and artist.

Debenham was born at 17 Melbury Road, London,^[1] to Sir Ernest Ridley Debenham, 1st Baronet, and his wife, Lady Cicely, of the Debenhams department store family business.^[3] After attending a finishing school in Paris, Alison Debenham studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1923 to 1926.^[4] In 1928 she returned to live in Paris before, in 1929, moving to the south of France where she studied with the French painter Simon Bussy.^[4] There she met several prominent artists and authors including André Gide and Henri Matisse and, in 1930, married artist René Le Plat.^[3]

Throughout her artistic career, Debenham mostly painted portraits of friends and family members but also created a series of portraits of the workers on her father's estate.^[3] She regularly exhibited in both London and Paris and her first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Vignon in Paris in 1932.^[4]

In 1935 she had a solo show at the Zwemmer Gallery in London and for a time she was associated with the Euston Road School of artists. A memorial exhibition for Debenham was held at the Richmond Hill Gallery in 1968 and a further retrospective was mounted by the Belgrave Gallery in London in 1976.^[3][4]

She died in 1967 in London and was survived by her son, Jean-Luc, and daughter, Clarissa.^[2]

• Alison Debenham, introduction by Claude Rogers, The Belgrave Gallery, London, 1976.

10 artworks by or after Alison Debenham at the Art UK site