Lily (Leah) Delissa Joseph née Solomon

Lily Joseph was born to a prosperous family living in Bermondsey. Her father was a Londoner and her mother was from Prague. An adventurous spirit, Lily was one of the first women to own and drive a car; in her fifties she learned to fly. She was active in the establishment of Brook Green Synagogue in Hammersmith, where she was well known for her fine singing voice.

Like her brother, though – Solomon Joseph Solomon (1860-1927) – she was best known as an artist, and remains quite highly rated. He is particularly known for his portraits and large-scale paintings of scenes from the Bible and mythology. A member of the Artists Rifles in the First World War, he was also a pioneer and strong advocate of camouflage techniques.

Lily, for her part, was more drawn to landscape painting and interiors, as well as portraiture, and was clearly influenced by Impressionism. Trained at the Ridley School of Art and the Royal Academy, she exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Paris Salons (where she won a silver medal in 1929 and gold in 1934), the New English Art Club, the Society of Women Artists and the Women’s International Art Club.

Her strong involvement in the women’s suffrage movement is what connects her to Islington. The very night in 1912 when she was meant to be attending a private view of her work at the Baille Gallery, she was in Holloway Prison, by then a focal point of the struggle. She had been among some 150 suffragettes arrested on 1 March, the opening day of an intensified campaign. In a pre-planned attack with hammers, stones and clubs, they spread out simultaneously to smash shop and office windows across the West End – well aware that in doing so they risked imprisonment. Leah was committed to Holloway for a month. Her husband, the architect Delissa Joseph, later placed a sardonic notice of apology in the Jewish Chronicle to visitors to her show. Whether or not with conscious irony, the Tate Gallery holds in its collection her 1937 work, Roofs, High Holborn, showing the view from her studio towards the Old Bailey.