Albert Simon Aimé Bussy (30 June 1870 – 22 May 1954) studied at Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris where he met and became lifelong friends with Henri Matisse. He came to England in 1901 where he met and married Dorothy Strachey, sister of the writer and critic Lytton Strachey, and thus his connection with the fabled Bloomsbury Group was sealed.
It was following their 1903 wedding while on their honeymoon that they discovered a small house at Roquebrune, near Monaco, which they soon bought and where they lived for the next three decades. The house, called Le Souco became a meeting place for artists, writers and intellectuals, with guests including Bloomsbury members Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and other notable figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Gertler and Bernard Bresson.
Paintings and pastels by Simon Bussy are today in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Musée nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée départemental de l’Oise in Beauvais, and elsewhere.
