A Girl's Head (1924)

Edna Waugh Clarke Hall

etching on thin oriental laid paper

Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London

Photo credit: Trustees of the British Museum

Classification:

Materials:

Oriental laid paper

Physical Object Description:

Head of a woman with wavy hair three-quarter to right. c.1924 Etching, on thin oriental laid paper. Verso signed in pencil.

Technique:

Etching

Dimensions:

12.5 x 8.7 cm

Accession Number:

1924,0209.16

Credit:

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 1924

Scheme:

Prints and Drawings Fund (1919 - 1954)

Ownership history:

Gifted by F. D. Samuel (1877-1951) to the Contemporary Art Society, 1922; presented to the Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London, 1924

Relationship:

Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London Frederick Dudley 'F. D.' Samuel

Edna Clarke Hall (née Waugh) was a watercolour artist, etcher and lithographer. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks (1862-1937) from 1894 where she won the Summer Composition Prize in 1897 and was awarded a scholarship. The following year, when she was only 19, she married William Clarke Hall (1866-1932), a barrister friend of her father’s who had recommended her to the art school. However, there were tensions in the marriage and she resorted to illustrating Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, which she did for the rest of her artistic life. She had two sons, born 1905 and 1910 respectively, but she often suffered from depression despite having an critically-acclaimed exhibition at the Chenil Galleries in 1914 and she had a nervous breakdown in 1919. Encouraged by her former teacher Henry Tonks and her psychologist, her husband set up a studio for her in South Square, Gray's Inn, where she could work. Between 1924 and 1941 she exhibited regularly at The Redfern Gallery in London. After the death of her recently-knighted husband a trust was formed by their friends and Lady Clarke-Hall’s fellow Slade students, the siblings Mrs F. Samuel (Dorothy Salaman), Mrs. E. Bishop (Louise Salaman), and Michel Hewitt Salaman, to enable her to retain her studio and continue working. In 1941, after her studio was destroyed in the Blitz, 46 of Clarke-Hall’s drawings were donated by the Salamans to the Contemporary Art Society which were distributed to 12 museums throughout the UK.

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