| Alison Debenham | |
| Birth Name: | Alison Edith Debenham |
| Birth Date: | 18 February 1903[1] |
| Birth Place: | Holland Park, London, England |
| Death Date: | [2] |
| Death Place: | London, England |
| Nationality: | British |
| Education: | Slade School of Art |
| Field: | Portraiture |
| Spouse: | René Le Plat (m. 1930) |
Alison Edith Debenham (later Le Plat, 18 February 1903 – 24 November 1967) was a British painter and artist.
Debenham was born in 1903 in London,[1] to Sir Ernest Ridley Debenham, 1st Baronet, and his wife, Lady Cicely, of the Debenhams department store family business.[3] After attending a finishing school in Paris, Alison Debenham studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1923 to 1926.[4] In 1928 she returned to live in Paris before, in 1929, moving to the south of France where she studied with the French painter Simon Bussy.[4] There she met several prominent artists and authors including André Gide and Henri Matisse and, in 1930, married artist René Le Plat.[3]
Throughout her artistic career, Debenham mostly painted portraits of friends and family members but also created a series of portraits of the workers on her father's estate.[3] She regularly exhibited in both London and Paris and her first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Vignon in Paris in 1932.[4]
In 1935 she had a solo show at the Zwemmer Gallery in London and for a time she was associated with the Euston Road School of artists. A memorial exhibition for Debenham was held at the Richmond Hill Gallery in 1968 and a further retrospective was mounted by the Belgrave Gallery in London in 1976.[3] [4]
She died in 1967 in London and was survived by her son, Jean-Luc, and daughter, Clarissa.[2]