Painter Bettina Caro was born to a Sephardi family in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1955. She is a direct descendant of Rabbi Yosef Caro (1488-1575), author of the Shulchan Aruch, and cites her ancestry, her upbringing in North Africa, and her family’s Sephardi traditions as the key themes in her paintings. Her father, she recalls as 'a keen amateur painter, [who] encouraged me to express myself through paint from the moment I could hold a brush. It was he who taught me how to use linseed oil to create a blurred effect'. In 1973 Caro moved to Spain to study art and architecture at the University of Madrid, then settled in London in 1981.
Caro primarily paints landscapes of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land, but has also received major portrait commissions. In 1992 she was invited to paint a portrait of Juan Carlos I, then King of Spain, as part of the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the country’s expulsion of their Jewish population. She exhibited with Ben Uri Gallery's Open exhibitions in 1985-1987, 1991, 1998 (Open Exhibition of Works by Contemporary Female Jewish Artists), and in 1999; as well as in the International Jewish Artist of the Year Award (IJAYA) in 2004 and 2006; she was runner-up in 2012. In 2010 she was commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to create a series of paintings to celebrate their 250th anniversary, published in a commemorative volume. Two of the works are now in the Board of Deputies Collection. She has had two retrospectives at the London Jewish Cultural Centre (LJCC) in 2011 and 2014. In 2018 she had a solo exhibition at the Centro Sepharad-Israel in Madrid.
Bettina Caro lives and works in London. She is represented in the Ben Uri Collection, Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue, the S&P Sephardi Synagogue and the Israeli Embassy in London, as well as the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.
