Clifford Hall (1904-1973) - San Marco Square

San Marco Square in Venice. Oil on canvas on board. Signed and dated 1948. Size without frame 30x41 cm. Including frame 42x53 cm. The artwork has descriptions and several exhibition labels on the reverse.

Clifford Hall, ROI, NS, (24 January 1904 – 25 December 1973) was a British painter of street scenes and bohemian life. One of his most recognizable postwar periods was the depiction of people who were to varying degrees covered with a towel or blanket. Some have their face turned away from or hidden from the viewer.

Clifford Eric Martin Hall was born in Wandsworth, London, and spent his youth in Richmond, first on Sheen Avenue and later on Mount Arras Road. He first studied at Elm Tree House School, then at Richmond Hill School from 1914, and afterward at King’s College School in Wimbledon. In the twenties he studied at Richmond Art School under Charles Wheeler and at Putney Art School under Stanley Anderson. From 1925 to 1927 he studied at the Royal Academy Schools, where he won a Landseer Scholarship and began taking portrait commissions, which helped finance his studies and housing 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, the son of Augustus John. Through John he was introduced to the Montparnasse district. He studied with André Lhote.

Hall returned to England in the 1930s, painting local scenes in Soho and elsewhere. From 1940 he painted Quentin Crisp three times, though the current whereabouts of two of these works is unknown. During World War II he joined an ARP ambulance team near Lots Road, Chelsea, and contributed independently to the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. In May 1941 a Clifford Hall war drawings exhibition, titled “Bombs On Chelsea,” was held at the Army Gallery in Old Bond Street, London, W1. Some of his drawings from that period, depicting the effects of air raids, are in the Imperial War Museum collection. His work also featured in the painting competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.

Hall’s most characteristic work comes from his later life, when, from the mid-1960s onward, he began painting portraits of women who were draped almost from head to toe in towels or other fabrics, with their faces obscured. These works echoed Hall’s many earlier pieces in which women were depicted with their heads bowed, their hair brushed so that it hid the face, or with their backs to the viewer, which he had previously alternated with conventional full-face portraits.

The contents of Hall’s studio were sold posthumously in 1982 by Christie's in London, and his paintings subsequently became widely distributed. They are found in many British institutional collections, some foreign collections, and frequently appear at auction.

Exhibitions
Hall exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI), the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists, the London Group, the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers (NS), and the Chelsea Art Society (CAS). In the final years of his life Hall served on the boards of three of these art societies: the ROI, the NS, and the CAS.

As for galleries, Hall had a solo show at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1935 and, after the war, with 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). In 1977 a memorial exhibition was held at the Belgrave Gallery. Three more exhibitions of Hall’s work were held at the Belgrave Gallery in 1982, 1989 and 1997.