Mrs Helen Lessore OBE (1907-1994) was a painter and British gallerist. She was, most notably, the director of Beaux Arts Gallery in London from 1951 until its closure in 1965. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1924-1928), Lessore was an accomplished painter who had a full retrospective exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1987. Her paintings can currently be found in public collections around Britain, including Tate and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Chadwick’s, Short Horn, was loaned to Venice for the XXVIII Biennale (1956) by Mrs Lessore, where it was subsequently purchased by the renowned Belgian art critic and collector, René Gaffé.

Reflecting on Short Horn, Gaffé wrote:

Délaissant le marbre et le bois, ne voyons-nous pas tous les jours de grands sculpteurs se précipiter sur des métaux quels qu’ils soient, à condition qu’ils puissent, sans trop d’efforts, les plier à leur convenance et en assurer le transport par des moyens moins onéreux qu’autrefois? …Ainsi, chaque matin que le soleil me tire du lit, j’aperçois le Taureau de Lynn Chadwick, armure d’acier recouverte de plâtre [sic] coloré et cette bête puissante, résignée, me regarde en silence. Elle ne perçoit pas les raisons secrètes qui me font assister à ses charges dont elle est généralement frustrée dans l’arène où elle est condamnée à mourir à cinq heures de l’après-midi.

Dans son ‘Guadalquivir’, Joseph Peyré l’a chanté:

Taureau noir, taureau noir,
Une mort à chaque corne,
Une peine dans chaque goutte
De son sang tourmenté.

Leaving aside marble and wood, don’t we find every day some great sculptors rushing to work on all kinds of metals, providing they are able to bend them without to much effort according to their needs, and ship them through less expensive means than in the past?… And so, every morning the sun pulls me out of bed, I see the ‘Taureau’ of Lynn Chadwick, a steel armor covered with colored plaster, and this powerful beast, resigned, stares at me in silence. It doesn’t perceive the secret reasons that make me watch its charges, from which it is usually deprived in the arena where it is sentenced to die at five o’clock in the afternoon.

Joseph Peyré sang it in his Guadalquivir:

Black bull, black bull,
One death on every horn
One sorrow in every drop
Of his tormented blood.

(R. Gaffé, ,A la verticale: Réflexions d’un collectionneur, Brussels, 1963, pp. 98-99)

Mrs. Helen Lessore O.B.E.
Acquired by René Gaffé at the Venice Biennale, 15th September 1956
Private Collection, The Netherlands
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, Canada

J.P. Hodin, Lynn Chadwick, Werk, vol. 44 (no. 3), March 1957, p. 113.
D. Farr and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p. 111, cat. no. 143 (ill. b&w)

London, New Burlington Galleries, 53rd London Group: British Painting and Sculpture, November – December 1954, no. 264
Venice, XXVIII Biennale, June – October 1956, p. 412, no. 51 (titled Vacca Shortorn), lent by Mrs H. Lessore