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Sara Lee Roberts is a London-based artist whose practice is rooted in a deep engagement with both the history of painting and the experience of landscape. In 2025, she was awarded a three-month residency at Monet’s Gardens in Giverny, an experience that has significantly informed her recent work. This followed a five-month residency in 2024 with the Royal Collection Trust, held during the Drawing the Renaissance exhibition at the King’s Gallery, where her abstracted drawn responses to works in the exhibition were presented alongside the historical material.
Her publication Painting and Reinterpreting the Masters (2020) reflects a longstanding commitment to re-examining historical art through a contemporary lens, combining references to canonical works with a more intuitive and abstract response to landscape. This dialogue between past and present continues to underpin her practice.
Lee Roberts has exhibited widely in both solo and group contexts. Notable solo exhibitions include Myth and Memory at Tregony Contemporary, Cornwall (2021), and Presence in Paint at North House Gallery (2017). Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions, most recently Drawn Together at the Royal Drawing School in 2025. In 2019, her work was shown at the Rijksmuseum as part of a major exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death.
Her work has been commissioned for a number of high-profile settings. In 2022, she completed a series of twelve large-scale landscapes for the Peninsula Hotel in London. In 2025, two large reinterpretations after Watteau were acquired by the Chancery Rosewood Hotel, London, where they are now on permanent display in the public rooms.
Lee Roberts’ paintings are held in numerous public and private collections, including Jesus College, Cambridge; the Unilever Collection; Charterhouse Securities; The National Open Art Collection; and the Dumfries House Collection. Her early career was marked by notable awards, including the Chairman’s Prize at the Discerning Eye exhibition at Mall Galleries, London (1999), and the Drawings in Hospitals Prize at the Royal Drawing School’s Drawing Year Exhibition (2008).
Alongside her practice, she is a senior tutor and alumni tutor at the Royal Drawing School. She originally trained as a paintings conservator at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge, and has undertaken restoration work for major collections including the Wallace Collection, the Royal Collection, and the National Trust. She also worked on the paintings at Charleston prior to its opening to the public. This experience has provided her with a profound understanding of the material and conceptual longevity of painting.
Since 1990, Sara Lee Roberts has dedicated herself fully to her work as an artist.
