Private
Edward Halliday
(1902 - 1984)
Self-portrait in the Studio, c. 1920
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Edward Halliday (1902 - 1984)
Size:
Height – 51cm
Width – 61cm
Edward Halliday and his wife, the Classicist Dorothy Hatswell, frequently holidayed in the Lake District. This image shows the couple above Seathwaite, a small hamlet in Borrowdale valley. The backdrop shows Seathwaite Fell:
Above Seathwaite fits into a genre of British art which emerged between the two World Wars. Government initiatives to improve the heath of the nation, and independent organisitions such as the Sunlight League and New Health Society, emerged. Exercise and sunbathing became popular as statuary holidays were enshrined in law. James Walker Tucker, Harry Epworth Allen, Bernard Fleetwood Walker, Ralph Chubb and Halliday were amongst many artists who recorded the ramblers, hikers, cyclists and picnickers who now swarmed into the countryside. This generation is inaugurating a new return to nature’, wrote the Northern Daily Mail in 1927. It turns its face increasingly to the country for fresh air and exercise and for the refreshment of the mind no less than the body’. Reviewing an exhibition of Chubb’s work at the Goupil Gallery in 1929, The Times considered that this phenom resembled the same spirit found in the work of William Blake (1757 ‚Äì 1827) with its interest in spiritual delight, mental pleasures ….serene physical health and beauty and activity…..in perfect scenery beneath the sun, with freedom’.
Painter in oil and watercolour mainly of portraits. Born in Liverpool, Halliday studied at the City School of Art there, in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi and at the Royal College of Art. He was awarded the Prix de Rome and worked at the British School there. Exhibited at RA, RBA, Paris Salon and RP, of which for a time he was president. His work is in the collections of HM The Queen, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Athenaeum Club, Wolverhampton Royal Hospital and Bootle Dyeworks. His work was reproduced in The Studio, Illustrated London News and The Times and he was interviewed by Stanley Casson for his book Artists at Work, published in 1933. In 1997, the University of Liverpool held an exhibition which concentrated on Halliday’s efforts to popularise art between the wars. Halliday’s daughter Charlotte is also an artist. He lived in London.
