Lady Sainsbury, Susie to her friends, wife of British Labour politician and supermarket heir and billionaire David, Baron Sainsbury of Turville — was in town Wednesday night a week ago and hosted a small dinner at Le Bilboquet for British artist Clare Shenstone. The event was in celebration of Shenstone’s first New York Solo show at Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts Gallery.

Bilboquet is a highly popular, very unpublicized Upper East Side watering hole for the chic Europeans who visit and/or live in New York. Susie, the baroness, was representing all of the Sainsbury family – the “Rockefellers of Great Britain” – whose charitable foundation helped mount the exhibition, under the expert directorship of Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, ex-director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Clare Shenstone next to her portrait of Francis Bacon

Shenstone started out as the portraitist and protégée of Francis Bacon, the celebrated surrealist who was “discovered” by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, the baron’s parents. Her career has followed an unusual path. She was born in Essex, England. Her father and grandfather were both architects who worked for the Duke of Bedford. Shenstone’s father was also an architect on many Gothic cathedrals and churches.

She began drawing when she was five but showed them only to her father. She didn’t see making art as a via career and instead chose the theater for which she also had a natural talent. Soon she was landing the ingenue roles both on television and on the stage. She played Solveig in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Constancia in Man of the World for the Prospect Theater Company.

But by then she had plunged into painting. After big abstract canvases got her into the Chelsea School of Art, she turned down parts offered by Antonioni and Tony Richardson (in I, Claudius). She went to the Royal College of Art to get her MA and joined a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Chekhov’s Ivanov. Her acting career was over, but she had learned how the human face transmits emotion and this informs her art.

She realized that she needed to draw from life. This was even less modish in the 70s than it is today and it was only her third year that the Royal College agreed to hire a model. Until then she filled sketchbooks with drawings made in the Natural History Museum, the London Zoo and the British Museum. It was drawing Assyrian friezes there that decided her to make faces in relief but bronze, marble, wood, even clay, wouldn’t capture the fleshiness she wanted. Impressed by Pop artists’ use of fabric and by Egyptian mummies in the museum, she resolved to use cloth. She called her first cloth head Janet.

Janet hung with eleven other cloth heads and sixty drawings at Shenstone’s degree show at the Royal College in 1979. It was bought by Francis Bacon. Two years later, he commissioned a portrait. A cloth head. Shenstone had never made a formal portrait but Bacon treasured the result. Thus began a four year working relationship during which she drew and painted innumerable portraits. These are a core element in her work. One has been purchased by Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.

She also made the processes she learned with Bacon, particularly making multiple images, part of her work. For years she has been drawing the same character at London’s Speakers’ Corner. Inventive and investigative, she constantly explores her medium. She works with wax and wire and her figurines can truly be called anima—the Jungian term for the individual’s inner self or soul.

In addition to the works on display, on occasion of her New York debut, the artist has made available for sale 20 of her preparatory sketches of Francis Bacon.

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