Stella Steyn Sold at Auction Prices

Figure painter, Painter, Lithographer

Steyn was born in Dublin in 1907 to dentist William Steyn and Bertha Jaffe. Both parents had moved to Ireland from the town of Akmene on the borders of Latvia and Lithuania. They met and were married in Limerick. Stella was an Irish artist with a Jewish heritage.

She studied at Alexandra College and the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she studied with artist Patrick Tuohy (1925-16). In the company of her mother and another artist, Hilda Roberts, she traveled to Paris in 1926 to study at the Académie Scandinave and at La Grande Chaumière. In Paris she met James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who later requested her to make illustrations for a publication of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" ["Finnegans Wake"].These illustrations are fantastically imaginative. In 1928 she was awarded the Tailteann Silver Medal at the Metropolitan School in Dublin.

In 1931, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Germany. The 1930's were a dangerous time for a Jewish artist living in Germany. In 1933 she met David Ross whom she married in 1938. The couple moved to England after Ross was hired as a Professor of French at the University of London.