Julie Held (b. 1958 London, England - Lives London, England)
My Father, 2011
Oil on canvas
150 x 92 cm
Private Collection
© Julie Held
Second generation German-Jewish émigrée
The artist's father, Peter Held, born into a Jewish family in Leipzig, Germany fled to England in the 1930s. She has commented elsewhere that her 'sense of Jewishness' is broadly based within the German Jewish tradition. 'All émigrés', she has noted, 'must experience the dilemma of assimilation and the retention of identity'.
Her deeply felt portraiture is centred on a familiar cast of sitters, chief among them her father, the subject of numerous portraits over the years and, until his death in 2018, probably her most frequent sitter; each session deepening the bond between father and daughter, artist and sitter. In this moving portrait, an ageing figure, wrapped against the cold, he sits patiently in his chair, calmly meeting the viewer's gaze.
