20 Facts About Sylvia Sleigh

Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City.

Sylvia Sleigh returned to painting and moved to London in 1941 after marrying her first husband, an English painter named Michael Greenwood.

Sylvia Sleigh met her second husband, Lawrence Alloway, an English curator and art critic, while taking evening classes to study art history at the University of London; they married in 1954 and moved to the United States in 1961.

Ingres's painting has many nude women but Sylvia Sleigh minimized the number and painted only six men.

Sylvia Sleigh often used her husband and friends as models because they were important to her.

In 1972, Sylvia Sleigh played a significant role in securing a venue and serving as a juror for Women Choose Women, a major exhibition of more than 100 works by female artists at the New York Cultural Center in January and February 1973.

Sylvia Sleigh painted group portraits of the artists in both organizations.

Between 1976 and 2007, Sleigh painted a series of 36-inch portraits which feature women artists and writers, including Helene Aylon, Catharine R Stimpson, Howardena Pindell, Selina Trieff, and Vernita Nemec.

In 2011, the Sylvia Sleigh Collection was donated to the Rowan University Art Gallery and forms the core of its permanent collection.

In 2006, Sylvia Sleigh donated her largest painting, Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill, to the Hudson River Museum.

In fourteen panels totaling 70 feet in length, Sylvia Sleigh's panorama occupies two walls when exhibited.

Sylvia Sleigh was inspired by the pastoral works of Antoine Watteau, Giorgione, and Edouard Manet.

Between 1953 and 2010, Sylvia Sleigh had more than 45 solo exhibitions at colleges and universities, professional art galleries, and museums, most notably at Douglass College, University of Rhode Island, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Butler Institute of American Art.

Sylvia Sleigh's work is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, Art Institute of Chicago, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Akron Art Museum, and others.

Sylvia Sleigh taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978 and at the New School for Social Research from 1974 until 1977 and between 1978 and 1980.

Sylvia Sleigh received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1985.

In 2008, Sylvia Sleigh was honored with the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement by the College Art Association.

Sylvia Sleigh was similarly recognized by the Women's Caucus for Art, which posthumously awarded Sleigh the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

Sylvia Sleigh died of complications from a stroke in October 2010.

Sylvia Sleigh's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.