Name Clifford Hall Role Painter | Died December 25, 1973 | |
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Clifford Eric Martin Hall, RBA, ROI, (24 January 1904 – 25 December 1973) was a British painter of street scenes and bohemian life who towards the end of his career began to paint women covered almost head to toe and with their faces usually hidden.
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Early life and career
Born in Wandsworth, London, Hall spent his youth in Richmond, at Sheen Avenue, then in Mount Arras Road. He was educated first at Elm Tree House School, then Richmond Hill School from 1914, followed by King's College School, Wimbledon. In the 1920s he studied at Richmond Art School under Charles Wheeler and at Putney Art School under Stanley Anderson. From 1926 to 1927 he studied at the Royal Academy schools on a Landseer Scholarship and accepted small portrait commissions which together funded his studies and lodgings in Twickenham. He was influenced by Charles Sims and Walter Sickert. From 1928 he lived in Paris where he shared a studio in Malakoff with Edwin John, son of Augustus John. Through John he was introduced to the Montparnasse district. He studied under Andre Lhote.
Return to England
Hall returned to England in the 1930s where he painted local scenes in Soho and elsewhere. From 1940 he painted Quentin Crisp three times but the current whereabouts of these works is unknown. He joined a stretcher party near Lots Road during the Second World War and made independent submissions to the War Artists Advisory Committee. Some of his drawings from that period depicting the effects of air raids are in the Imperial War Museum.
His second marriage, in 1956, was to Ann Hewson his student at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art.
Later work
Hall's most distinctive work is from his later life when from the mid 1960s he started to paint portraits of women swathed in towels or other fabric almost from head to toe with the face hidden. These works echoed Hall's many earlier works in which women were shown head down, brushing their hair so that the hair obscured the face, or facing away from the spectator, which he had previously interspersed with conventional full face portraits.
The contents of Hall's studio were sold post-mortem in 1982 by Christie's in London and his paintings were thereby fairly widely distributed. They may be found in many British institutional collections, some foreign collections, and often appear at auction.
Exhibitions
Hall exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists, the London Group, and the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers.
Among galleries, Hall had a one-man exhibition at Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery in 1935 and after the end of the Second World War, at Roland, Browse and Delbanco (1946, 1947, 1950), the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, the Ashgrove Gallery, the Redfern Gallery, Goupil Gallery, and the Leicester Galleries (1952). A memorial exhibition was held at the Belgrave Gallery in 1977.
Works
This is an incomplete list of works: