Opens Thursday 2nd November 2006 6pm - 9pm
Running through until 6pm Satuday 25th November 2006.
While the Exhibition is visible on-line and at the Gallery from Saturday 28th October nothing will be sold before Opening Hour 6.00 pm Thursday 2nd November.
Should you be unable to attend and like to leave a commission please ring us.
Please click on the thumbnail photograph to see a larger picture of the image.
REMEMBER these are only photographs, in general the real thing looks better!
Running through until 6pm Satuday 25th November 2006.
While the Exhibition is visible on-line and at the Gallery from Saturday 28th October nothing will be sold before Opening Hour 6.00 pm Thursday 2nd November.
Should you be unable to attend and like to leave a commission please ring us.
Please click on the thumbnail photograph to see a larger picture of the image.
REMEMBER these are only photographs, in general the real thing looks better!
Chronology
1879 : Born Edna Waugh; a daughter of Benjamin Waugh, a founder of the NSPCC.1893-1898 : Enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, where she won numerous prizes for drawing and composition. Despite taking lessons in oil painting from Gwen John, her friend and contemporary, she soon realised oil was not the right medium for her, 'I wanted to draw a subject quickly, seize it, convey my impression', hence watercolour became her chosen medium.
1898 : Married the barrister William Clarke Hall, who despite encouraging her through her student years was unable to understand and accept the way in which she wished to work. Her painting therefore became increasingly personal and private.
1899 : Work first accepted at the New English Art Club.
1902 : The Clarke Halls bought Great House, a 16th century farmhouse at Upminster where she was to live in until the 1970s. Inspired by the house, by her reading and her mood she began a long running series of ink drawings illustrative of Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights' (Tate Gallery and Manchester City Art Gallery).
1905 : Justin born. Motherhood and her duties as the wife of a brilliant barrister – Clarke Hall was known particularly for the pioneering of reforms of Child Law for which he was knighted – stimulated her need to and talent for 'catching the moment'.
1910 : Denis (d.2006) born.
: Exhibited 'Suggestions for Illustrations for Wuthering Heights' at the Friday Club.
1915 : Following many years of summer holidays in Cornwall bought a cottage at Gillan Creek, south of the Helford Estuary where they summered until 1927.
1919 : Experienced a breakdown from which she was helped to recover by Tonks who encouraged her husband to pay more recognition to her as an artist. Willie then provided her with a Studio of her own in London.
1924 : The first of several exhibitions over 20 years at the Redfern Gallery.
1926 : Her 'Poem Pictures' published.
1927 : A winter spent in the Egyptian desert following an attack of arthritis in her hands resulted in a new body of work.
1931 : Sir William Clarke Hall dies. A Trust formed by friends enabled her to keep her Studio at Gray's Inn.
1939 : Retrospective Exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery.
1941 : Destruction of her London Studio and much of her work during the Blitz.
1949 : Following increased suffering from arthritis in her hands Edna Clarke Hall ceases to paint.
1985 : 'Edna Clarke Hall': Exhibition at Sheffield City Art Gallery.
Public Collections:
British Museum. Victoria and Albert Museum. Manchester City Art Gallery.
Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, National Museum of Wales.
'Cornwall! It was our holiday destiny for so many years that
Like the hills my memory knows
Where the summer sea wind blows'
Edna Clarke Hall's great skill with pen and brush was nurtured at the Slade School of Art, London, during the late 1890s. This was a golden age for student talent. Her contemporaries and close friends included the Johns (Gwen and Augustus and Ida, Augustus's first wife), William Orpen, and Ambrose McEvoy. Drawing then, and always, was the unfailing compulsive joy of her life. Like the hills my memory knows
Where the summer sea wind blows'
It is twenty five years since I first saw one of Edna's powerful depictions of sun on sand. I had just began my researches into the artist's life and work and had gone to meet a niece, Mary Fearnley Sander with whom Edna lived during the last years of her life. It was a wet and windy February day, but immediately I entered Mary's snug parlour I found myself transported back to a few glorious days of the previous summer when I had been staying with friends on the south Cornish coast. Hanging above her mantelpiece was a beautiful painting of a mother with her two young children clinging to her, her skirts flapping in the sea breeze. The group stood with their backs to the viewer, gazing out to sea towards a distant horizon. I was struck by the fluidity of Edna's line and by the evocation of the unselfconscious bond between mother and child.
I have now had the pleasure of seeing many of Edna's plein air watercolours. I continue to be amazed by their seeming ease and spontaneity; a spontaneity that is never merely slick, even at its most summary. Her line is always alive, sprung with emotion. Edna was always a romantic, moved to near ecstasy by the outdoor life of her Cornish summers. With supreme power and confidence she recorded her sons and their Cornish friends exploring rock pools, being buffeted by the wind as they crewed their father's boats, or absorbed in their own private holiday reveries. Edna's zest for, and enjoyment of the simplicity of the outdoor life never fails to communicate through these works.
During the 1910s and early 1920s Edna and her husband, Willie, rented a small white-washed cottage on the beach close to the mouth of the river Carne near Gillan Creek. Their principal motive for coming to Cornwall was to indulge Willie's passion for sailing. Willie, a lawyer, possessed only a limited sympathy with his wife's artistic aspirations.Yet during these summer weeks at Gillan Creek they lived a life of simple domestic harmony, well reflected in the hundreds of sketches and drawings she produced during their stay. On some days she would accompany Willie in his boat; making pencil notes on her sketches to remind her of the colour tones to add when back on dry land. On other days Edna would enjoy simple domestic tasks like doing the washing with her friend, Mrs Bowen, from next door – 'scarf around my head, dress to my knees, bare armed and barefooted … water to be fetched from the natural well at the end of the garden while nettles stung your bare legs'!2
In the 1920s, Edna started exhibiting these Cornish watercolours, her powerful illustrations to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and a series of watercolours incorporating her poems, in a series of shows at the Redfern Gallery. The art critic of The Times perfectly summarized her great talent:
'(she) is original in the good sense of having her own touch, her own vision – more than all, her own spirit, which shines through everything she does.'
Alison Thomas
Dr Thomas is the author of 'Portraits of Women: Gwen John and her Forgotten Contemporaries'
and curated the retrospective exhibition of Edna Clarke Hall's Work for Sheffield City Art Gallery (1986)