Private
Edward Halliday
(1902 - 1984)
Self-portrait in the Studio, c. 1920
Private Collection
Edward Halliday (1902 - 1984)
Size:
Height – 74.7cm
Width – 134.7cm
In its original black and silver Italian bolection moulding frame.
The Thirties. The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism, Palazzo Strozzi, Jan 2013.
Hypnos was commissioned in 1927 by Sir Benjamin
Johnson, for his house Abbot’s Lea, Liverpool, and completed
in 1928 during the last year of Halliday’s Rome Scholarship.
Johnson was an insomniac, hence the choice of Hypnos, god of
sleep, and the painting hung in the corridor outside Johnson’s
bedroom. The iconography was devised by Dorothy Hatswell, a
classicist and assistant librarian at The British School at Rome,
whom Halliday married in 1928. The painting includes portraits
of Halliday’s friend and fellow Rome Scholar in Painting Robert
Lyon as well as Bobby Longdon, a friend and classics scholar
at The British School at Rome.
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.
