Painter George Weissbort was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium on 11 April 1928. Following Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship in 1933, the family relocated to England, settling in north London, an area densely settled by refugees from Nazism. During the Second World War Weissbort was evacuated with his mother and brother to Oxford, where a chance visit to the Ashmolean Museum, and a meeting with Hitler émigré’ painter Arthur Segal, sparked his lifelong passion for drawing and painting.
After the war, Weissbort studied life drawing under Bernard Meninsky and painting under Ruskin Spear and Rodrigo Moynihan at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Committed to realism, he steadfastly ignored modernism and the postwar move towards abstraction, instead exhaustively researching old master techniques, experimenting with various media, consulting professional restorers, grinding his own pigments and preparing his own varnishes. He also developed an indepth knowledge of art history and dedicated hours to the study of a single painting. His oeuvre includes delicate still lifes (often featuring a trademark red ribbon), landscapes, and portraits, all meticulously observed; notable sitters included the polymath Jonathan Miller and former Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie.
Weissbort exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (from 1956), as well as with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Fine Art Society. In 1960 Hinckley Council purchased ‘The Letter’, which was exhibited at the RA that same year. He also exhibited in France (holding a large exhibition in Paris in 1964), as well as Belgium, Germany, and Mexico. Retrospectives were held at the Chambers Gallery, London (2006), which also published a number of his essays on art, and at the Denise Yapp Gallery in Monmouth, Wales in 2008, with poet and critic Anthony Rudolf observing that ‘To paint in the spirit of Poussin, Chardin, Piero, Vermeer and Holbein in the 21st century’, was, ‘for this painter, a radical project of artistic reclamation and psychic renewal’ (George Weissbort, Paintings and Drawings, Parnassus, 2008, p. 6).
George Weissbort died in the Wye Valley, Gloucestershire, England on 9 September 2013. In an obituary, the critic Brian Sewell, an admirer of his work, described him as having ‘painted the right pictures at the wrong time’ (Independent, 9 September 2013). Weissbort’s work is in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation and Hinckley Council, Leicestershire.
