Jane Noble

Jane, Lady Abdy (born Jane Noble) (24 May 1934 – 22 December 2015) was an English socialite and art dealer. She has been described as one of the most original and respected art dealers of her generation and opened British eyes to 19th-century French art. She is also credited for introducing many now revered 19th-century Danish artists to the international market.

Early life She was born on 24 May 1934 in Leicester, an art dealer whose vast fortune derived from the family's ownership of large parts of the Port of London. They married on 5 September 1962 when she was 28 and he was 66. Earlier that year, he had divorced his second wife, Lady Diana Bridgeman, who had suffered brain damage after a car crash in 1956. The couple lived in a duplex flat at 55 Eaton Square and at Newton Ferrers, a 17th-century country house in St Mellion, Cornwall, that Abdy had acquired in 1936 and then renovated in the Art Deco taste.

Later life In 1990 she moved to 8 Pelham Place where she stayed for the rest of her life. for an editorial for Vogue.

Jane died at the age of 81, on 22 December 2015, at her home in Pelham Place. Her collection of art went on sale by Sotheby's in an online auction, called La Belle Epoque: 19th & 20th Century Pictures. A remembrance by the writer Hugo Vickers calls her "Belle of the London Art World".