Edna's biographer, Alison Thomas, contributed the Foreword and then declared: "Your book has arrived……… a red letter day. It is fabulous. What a marvellous tribute to all Edna achieved."
"It's wonderful" (Tom Edwards, MD of Abbott and Holder Ltd)
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This is the first book on the art of Edna Clarke Hall. It is both long overdue and a pioneering and comprehensive survey of the work of an exceptional and extraordinary artist: Edna was recognised as an artistic genius when she entered the Slade School of Fine Art at the early age of fourteen. This was during the Slade’s golden era of the 1890s, famously led by its charismatic drawing master Henry Tonks. Edna became his favourite female student and he mentored her for decades afterwards.

Edna was a visionary and individualistic artist, like William Blake, but she was also ‘quick on the draw’, sketching life around her like a candid photographer. Before leaving the Slade her deeply spiritual, aesthetic and spontaneous fun-loving personality was partially eclipsed by marriage, when only nineteen, to a radical but older Victorian lawyer, William Clarke Hall. From their honeymoon onwards Edna felt a great gulf in her emotional life and this became partially filled by her obsessive illustrations for one resonant source, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and in the 1920s her highly expressive and original Blakean Poem-Pictures. This was at a time when she was acknowledged as one of Britain’s leading female artists, with The Times hailing her as ‘the most imaginative artist we have’.

Featuring nearly 400 illustrations, publication of this book has ensured that Edna’s reputation is back on course again at last.
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All proceeds, after the cost of this edition, are to be donated to charities concerned with endangered species disadvantaged by Man.