Lydia Corbett, Sylvette David | A Retrospective

8th March 2024 - 6th April 2024

‘Encounters with Picasso & the Making of Art’ Friday 8 March 16:00, a talk with the artist & Lucien Berman. Then join us for the preview on Friday 8 March 17:30 onwards, all welcome!

Meet the artist Saturday 9 March 11:00 – 13:00.

Lydia Corbett, also known as Sylvette David and known to art lovers all over the world as “The Girl with the Ponytail”, is Pablo Picasso’s last living muse. 

Born in Paris in 1934, Sylvette was invited by Picasso to his studio in Vallauris at the age of nineteen after he caught sight of her the previous year through an old pottery window and became fascinated by her.  Picasso internalised her as his muse, in drawings and a series of lithographs, and she regularly posed for him from that fateful meeting onwards.  The meeting would alter Sylvette’s life. Sylvette David was for Picasso, his last, unobtainable love.

For many years Lydia Corbett has divided her time between homes in Devon and Provence. A hugely talented and still prolific artist in her own right, Corbett’s works tell the story of a woman who shared Picasso’s artistic life for a time and intertwined it with her own, continuing to develop her strong artistic voice.

The exhibition at the Penwith Gallery is one of Corbett’s most comprehensive, bringing together early and late works, the watercolours and oils of the past thirty years alongside ceramics which the artist has gathered and repurposed, using them as a blank canvas for her self-portraits and recurring motifs. Many of the works attest to a return to source – memories of Picasso, of the inner life of objects. Corbett recaptures Sylvette as a girl, the subjects of her art through a process of assimilation and reduction – a vase of flowers, an old kettle, a church, the horses, the hammocks, the dappled sunshine of Camaret in Provence and the Mediterranean Sea.

Lydia Corbett is a visionary artist, no less visionary for her failing eyesight, as her subject is focused on inner vision, inner presence.  Lydia Corbett’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Penwith Gallery is curated by the artist along with Lucien Berman, Jason Lilley and Tom Leaper.