Brenda Pye, known as Brenda Landon or Brenda Capron, was an English portrait painter and landscape artist.
14 Facts About Brenda Pye
2.
Brenda Pye exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Paris Salon, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Association of Women Artists; she was a member of the Association of Sussex Artists.
3.
Brenda Pye was born on 29 November 1907, and died in London at the age of 97 on 26 April 2005.
4.
Brenda Pye was the youngest child of a barrister called Walter Capron who was himself the youngest son of a landed gentry family seated at Southwick Hall in Northamptonshire.
5.
Brenda Pye's mother's maiden name was Whistler, and through her she was a distant cousin of the English artist Rex Whistler and his brother the glass engraver Sir Laurence Whistler; she was more distantly related to the Anglo-American artist James McNeill Whistler.
6.
Brenda Pye was educated privately and at Eastbourne Ladies College, Sussex, before taking up a scholarship to study at Eastbourne College of Art.
7.
Brenda Pye had a studio built for her in the grounds of his Jacobean farmhouse in Buxted, Sussex, and Brenda Pye, entered her most prolific period as an artist.
8.
Brenda Pye was commissioned to paint many portraits, including the journalist and broadcaster Fyfe Robertson and the Headmaster of the London Oratory School John McIntosh OBE.
9.
Brenda Pye's portraits were exhibited in London at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and in Paris at the Paris Salon.
10.
Brenda Pye painted during travels with her husband in Scotland and France, and to a lesser extent in Wales, Portugal, Italy and South Africa.
11.
Brenda Pye's style became softer and more impressionistic than her work during and before the war, but it was only occasionally purely abstract.
12.
Brenda Pye's favoured medium was always oil on canvas, but she painted on board or wood, and in watercolour.
13.
Brenda Pye always painted directly from life: never from photographs and usually without preparatory drawings.
14.
Brenda Pye had one-woman exhibitions of her work in Sussex.