The Gold Jacket

A portrait of the artist's wife, Ursula, shown in a relaxed yet confident pose and dressed in a gold-green jacket which matches the mood and colour of the background with paint applied in broken touches and a light palette.

Berlin-born Ursula Leo (1915–1984), came to England as a refugee in 1939. She had attended art school in Silesia and met and married Levy after becoming one of his students, and later one of his most frequent models. She continued to paint under her own name but also used her organisational skills to promote her husband’s career. An extensive wartime correspondence in the Manchester Archives, including with the Church of England Committee for non-Aryan Christians and the Quaker Refugee Committee shows the Levys (eventually successful) efforts to secure passage for her parents from Nazi-occupied Germany. Levy’s play ‘The Valley of the Bones’ is set in a German concentration camp.