Veronica Burleigh SWA, WIAC (1909-1999) was a well-known painter in oil and watercolour of portraits (chiefly on commission), figure subjects and landscapes. The daughter of the artists C H H Burleigh ROI and Averil Burleigh ARWS she was born at 7 Wilbury Cresent, in Hove on 7th April 1909.

Veronica studied at Brighton School of Art and, after winning a scholarship, at the Slade School of Fine Art 1927-30 under Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer.  She exhibited at the Royal Academy from the age of 18, and showed there regularly before the war but once only subsequently. She also showed at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, Britain in Watercolours, Society of Women Artists and Women's International Art Club. In the late 1930s she was elected to the WIAC but she joined the SWA after the war.  Locally she showed with the Sussex Women's Arts Club, being elected a member in 1929, and with the Society of Sussex Painters in Worthing, where the public gallery holds her work.

During the period June 1939 to June 1947 Veronica served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and during that time she painted portraits of servicemen and women.

In the 1930s she held a solo show at the family owned Clarence Gallery in Brighton and much later at The Grange in Rottingdean in 1972.  For twenty years from the late 1950s she commuted yearly to Rhodesia, where she held twenty-three solo shows, and during that time she painted a portrait of the Prime Minister, Ian Smith, which work was exhibited in 1967.  One of her paintings hung in Parliament House in what was Salisbury, Rhodesia. Veronica also painted portraits in Algiers and Malta on commission and landscapes in Mozambique.

In 1970 she moved from Brighton to Blackstone Village, near Henfield, in Sussex, and died at Burgess Hill in October 1999. (Information largely gathered from my father's interview with Veronica Burleigh in the 1970s).