Even though gallery owner Patricia Lee told friends as much as a year ago that she had inoperable cancer, news of her death came as a shock in the arts community and in her wider circle of friends over the weekend.
When her longtime friend and associate Randall Wombold told those gathered for an arts symposium Saturday of her death the afternoon before, several in attendance were moved to comment on how her enthusiasm and elan would be missed.
"Lee," as she was known to many on St. Thomas, owned the Camille Pissarro Gallery in downtown Charlotte Amalie. She had devoted much of her energy in recent years to promoting the gallery, the artist for whom it was named and the building in which it was housed — the birthplace and childhood home of the famed French Impressionist who left the islands as a young man, never to return.
According to Wombold, he and his wife, Debra, Lee's massage therapist and close friend for more than 20 years, hope to keep the gallery in operation in keeping with Lee's wishes.
An artisan in her own right, Lee produced striking contemporary jewelry from natural fibers, seeds and shells and was for many years an exhibitor at the Arts Alive fairs at Tillett Gardens. In the '80s, she and Tommy Lombardo operated the Mustard Seed, a funky emporium chock full of vintage fashions and jewelry in the space most recently occupied by Zorba's restaurant on Government Hill.
While her accent was clearly educated English, she was fond of mentioning her Berber heritage. Lee Vanterpool, a longtime friend, relates that she was born in North Africa, her mother was a Berber and her father was a British major, a military strategist and a peer of the realm. Her full name was Lady Patricia Samuel-Lee.
She spent her childhood in England, attended boarding school in Kenya for six years, then returned to England. She became a high-fashion model known as "Paddy" in the '60s, Vanterpool said. "She was the first model to wear a mini-skirt designed by Yves St. Laurent, and she introduced go-go-boots for the House of Courreges," he said. "She also modeled for the House of Dior and her favorite, Balenciaga."
She later lived in New York and Canada and was for a time married to jazz artist Bobby Timmons, whom she had met while modeling in Paris. In the late 1970s, she came to St. Thomas to visit friends and ended up staying.
Since 1996, she had owned and operated the Pissarro Gallery, an intimate exhibition space consisting of two rooms on the top floor of the onetime Pissarro family residence that runs between Main and Back Streets.
About a year ago, when she learned that she had inoperable cancer of the lungs and esophagus, "she decided that she wanted to go as naturally as possible," Debra Wombold said. "She opted for the homeopathic way, with a lot of herbal remedies."
This decision, Vanterpool said, "gave her a year of no stress to do what she felt was important, and to be free of the pain and suffering that will often attend the traditional cancer treatments."
She was seriously ill for a month, they said, and was hospitalized for two weeks.
It was Lee's wish that her body be cremated and the ashes be scattered at sea between St. Thomas and Tortola, they said. "In a couple of weeks, we hope to have a memorial ceremony at sea to do that," Randall Wombold said.