Edna Clarke Hall

Lady Edna Clarke Hall née Waugh (1879–1979) was a watercolourist, printmaker and poet. Much of her artistic practice was devoted to an intimate exploration of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Clarke Hall showed promise as an artist from an early age and in 1893, at 14 years old, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art where Ethel Carrick also studied. Like Carrick, she took classes with the influential art teacher Henry Tonks and won numerous prizes for drawing and composition. Clarke Hall’s enrolment had been arranged by her father’s colleague, William Clarke Hall (1866–1932), a barrister 13 years her senior. The two became engaged and in 1898 Clarke Hall left the Slade to be married.

Initially, William Clarke Hall had given his wife assurance that he would support her work and not allow it to be overtaken by household duties, only for him to emotionally withdraw once they were married. In 1901, the two moved to a sixteenth century farmhouse in Upminster where Clarke Hall would live for the next 70 years. The atmosphere of the house and the ongoing breakdown of her relationship informed much of her work. At this time Clarke Hall developed her prolonged fascination with Wuthering Heights, identifying strongly with its heroine Catherine Earnshaw. She began an extended series of drawings of characters and scenes from the novel, in ink and watercolour, which she would complete in quick succession.

In 1919, Clarke Hall suffered from a nervous breakdown exacerbated by the turmoil of her marriage. With the assistance of her artistic mentor Henry Tonks and a psychologist, her husband was convinced to allow her a studio space which he started renting in 1922.

From 1924, Clarke Hall showed her prints and drawings regularly at the Redfern Gallery in solo and group exhibitions. She also published two illustrated books of her poetry, Poems in 1926 and Facets in 1930.

However, the 1940s brought the end of her career. In 1941, Clarke Hall’s studio and much of her work was destroyed in the Blitz and in 1949 she began to abandon her artistic practice due to arthritis. Clarke Hall lived until the age of 100. She was cared for by her niece until 1979 when she entered a nursing home.

Annabel McGowan, Assistant Curator, Australian Prints