PORTRAIT OF JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR
signed with initials RZ lower right; red, black and brown chalks on paper; 64 x 49cm; 25 1/4 x 19 1/4in (91 x 75.5cm; 35 3/4 x 29 3/4in framed)

Exhibited: London, Messum's Fine Art, Zsuzsi Roboz, Face to Face, 2011, no. 1

Born in Budapest, during the Second World War Roboz fled Hungary to live first with her mother in France and after the War in England. In London she learnt shorthand and began working for the film director Alexander Korda while taking life drawing courses in the evening. She subsequently studied at the Regents Street Polytechnic before being accepted into the Royal Academy Schools, and working in the studio of Pietro Annigoni in Florence (1955-57). On her return from Italy Roboz was commissioned by Korda to complete a series of drawings of artists under contract to his film studio for publication. Her first sitter was the actress Mary Ure, the second was Claire Bloom, Roboz's likenesses of each precipitating a stream of portrait commissions from the rich and famous.

In 1958 she had her first solo exhibition at the Walker Galleries, and in the early 1960s began a series of studies of dancers back stage at the charmingly disreputable Windmill theatre that closed shortly thereafter. The same decade Roboz was taken on by the dealer Jacques O'Hana and over the coming years she was commissioned to paint a varied and large cast of leading artists, actors, dancers and musicians, amongst them Elisabeth Frink, Laurence Olivier, Antoinette Sibley and Jacqueline du Pré. Her work was exhibited widely, her final exhibition being with Messums the year before her death.

Friends with Roboz for many years JRT described the extraordinary trajectory of her life and the elegant power of her art in his fascinating biography Roboz, A Painters Paradise published in 2005.