ECLIPSED WOMEN PAINTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 116, 17 May 1924, Page 22

ECLIPSED WOMEN PAINTERS.

When people wrote about the promise of the Slade School twenty years ago they used to decide that the most brilliant students were Augustus John, William Orpen, and Edna Clarke Hall. The history of the third makes one realise that it is undoubtedly a disadvantage to be a woman if one would be an artist as well. She went to the Slade at fourteen and did wonders. Then she married at eighteen and gave up etching for many years because nitric acid and babies cannot safely be kept in near association. The war began when her own children required less personal attention, and then she went to look after a settlement of East End youngsters, and worked so hard there that . there was no time to draw. Now she . " has emerged again with an exhibition of ' t etchings. \Some are inspired by i "Wuthering , Heights," and have aI ' delightful strength and wildness. , I j Mrs. Edna Clarke Hall's emergence I from the domestic eclipse which fol- i lowed her brilliant promise as a Slade 1 School student brings a leminder from 1 a correspondent of a London paper of another case in which creative genius was defeated by femininity—that of the late Mrs. Joanna Wells. As Joanna Boyce, this brilliant painter was in the j heart of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, • and was by many of the circle and its admirers considered better than Millais in his early manner. In the comprehensive Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition held at the Tate Gallery last April the few small examples of her work showed her to be a more promising artist than almost any of the others. She might have done great things as a painter. But, instead, she married and died in child-birth in . her thirtieth year.