Max Browne
The Art of Edna Clarke Hall: from Slade Student to Studio Destruction
A first illustrated book on five decades of inspirational drawing by a neglected genius
Written, produced and designed by Max Browne.
Printed and distributed by Blurb, Inc., 3325 S. 116th St., Suite 161 Tukwila WA, 98168 USA
220 pp, ISBN 978-1-8384456-1-4
https://www.ednaclarkehall.org.uk
Lydia Miller
Child prodigies have been recognised throughout art history. John Everett Millais was only eleven years old when he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, while others have been identified by tutors or encouraged by family members. Pablo Picasso’s father famously threw down his paint brushes and vowed never to paint again after seeing his son’s work. And, of course, many artists have achieved early recognition through the acclaim of the most revered art critics of their time.
Max Browne’s new publication The Art of Edna Clarke Hall explores one of these exceptionally talented artists. Born Edna Waugh, Edna Clarke Hall was the youngest student in her cohort at the Slade School of Fine Art, enrolling at the age of just fourteen in 1893. She was one of a number of students deemed brilliant along with characters like Augustus John, probably the most famous artist to come out of the Slade during the 1890s. Edna was singled out by her tutor Henry Tonks who asked her if she was going to be the next Edward Burne-Jones, to which she replied, ‘no, the next Edna Waugh’. The renowned art critic RH Wilenski even wrote that Edna Clarke Hall ‘is an artist of the calibre of Whistler’, with even more passion and curiosity than the celebrity painter. This was high praise indeed. Edna was determined, confident and brilliant, and from a young age was unafraid to venture into London unchaperoned to be close to newly acquired Old Masters in the National Gallery and the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain). With such a prominent start to her career, how did Edna Clarke Hall sink into the forgotten depths of art history?
Pushing back the large pages of Max Browne’s beautifully illustrated book, it is hard to fathom. As an art historian specialising in this period of modern British art, I am more than familiar with the work of Edna Clarke Hall and yet there are dozens of boldly executed watercolour and pen sketches I have never seen before, until now. This book presents a range of works from documentary sketches of everyday life, originally enclosed in well-loved portable sketchbooks, to colourful contemporary graphics of nude lovers entwined and set amongst scratched out poetry. Her work is immediate and emotive, and it gives the reader an entirely new appreciation for watercolour as a medium.
Edna Clarke Hall was one of a number of female students deemed more brilliant than their male counterparts at the Slade and yet, after marriage, domestic duties often took priority over their creative lives. Browne provides small accounts of these women throughout the book, with Ida Nettleship’s story being the most prominent – the wife of Augustus John, forced to accept her husband’s mistress into the family home, and dead by the age of 30 after giving birth to her fifth child. There is no way to sugar-coat Ida’s tragic last years and the impact it had on her friends, but Edna’s career could have been on a different trajectory had it not been for one man.
Browne has done a tremendous job at interweaving Edna’s relationship with her husband William Clarke Hall throughout this book, without undermining or overly victimising his subject. However, it is clear that William Clarke Hall, having been the person initially responsible for encouraging Edna to attend art school, spent years grooming her from the age of thirteen. Through manipulation and coercive control, he undermined her throughout their courtship and marriage, which eventually drove her to a mental health collapse in which her identity as a woman and as an artist had been entirely lost. Ironically William Clarke Hall was not only a barrister but an exponent of child welfare, working closely with Edna’s father, the founder of the NSPCC, Benjamin Waugh. Yet his unhealthy attraction to Edna, whom he creepily described as his ‘child forever’, was considered inappropriate at the time.
Unable to control Edna’s growing independence and talent at the Slade, nurtured by a tutor who saw female and male students as equals, William extracted his beloved from the school and spent years isolating her at various houses outside of London. Little did he realise that two houses in particular would become anchors in her recovery and provide creative relief. The 15th-century timber-framed Great Tomkyns, Upminster, became the inspiration for Edna’s illustrations to Wuthering Heights, ‘a prolific and obsessive artistic reaction’ to the book as described by Browne. But Great Tomkyns itself became a legal battle ground after William’s death, with his will demanding that she sell the family home, giving her little choice but to fight the executors and generate income as an artist-farmer. Keeping her house had become ‘a matter of life and death’.
Throughout their life together William’s constant comments about her work – ‘rubbish’ that should be removed from the walls and dining-room table – led to the artist becoming increasingly secretive in her practice and more withdrawn from reality. Wuthering Heights and the wild and passionate relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff provided a creative output for an artist starved of affection. Bronte’s celebrated novel undoubtedly provided Edna with reassurance that craving the basic need for human contact, and the feeling of being loved in a way that could be pure and instinctual, was not unreasonable.
Edna Clarke Hall lived to the age of 100 and within that time she lived several lives, supported by long-term friends like the Salaman siblings and Henry Tonks. Yet the damage caused by her husband even after his death, is, quite frankly, blood-curdling. Edna Clarke Hall against all odds, years of abuse and neglect, and a significant loss of her work during the Blitz when her London studio was bombed, continued to create work and exhibit successfully at the Redfern Gallery.
The combination of Browne’s text, Edna Clarke Hall’s beautifully presented illustrations and passages from her unpublished autobiography, Heritage of Ages, have created a vital addition to our understanding of Clarke Hall as an artist. Browne’s dedication to publishing as many artworks as possible could only be achieved as a self-published, non-profit publication, thus being exempt from the usual copyright and image restraints. This selfless and presumably costly publication is something to be celebrated.