Vision and Renewal: Edna Clarke Hall’s Dialogue with William Blake

As part of my doctoral placement at the V&A Museum, I have enjoyed the opportunity to research the poem paintings made by the artist Edna Clarke Hall (1879-1979). A selection of these extraordinary works was first exhibited just over a century ago at the Redfern Gallery in London in February 1926.

Combining word and image, these pictures display Clarke Hall’s affinities with the Romantic painter, poet and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827). Poems inscribed in black ink are paired with vivid brushstrokes or female nudes in designs akin to Blake’s famous illuminated books, with their texts framed by enigmatic scenes and sweeping colours.

Poem painting, watercolour and gouache, by Edna Clarke Hall, 1925–27, Britain. Museum no. E.2942-1948. ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Edna Clarke Hall

In one of my favourite poem paintings from the V&A collection, made between 1925 and 1927, the words are enveloped in bright bands of colour that seem to flicker like flames. They convey the verse’s sentiment of defiant joy:

Are we not angels or fairy-sprites

When we turn black pain into coloured delights?

Clarke Hall made the poem paintings almost unconsciously, in a parallel to Blake’s own visionary experiences. She wrote a letter to a friend describing the making of one picture: ‘[I] forgot everything and about half an hour afterwards I found I had been painting a page with a brand new poem on it […] there it was in radiation of colours.’ Like Blake, the artist was drawing with her inner eye to create an imaginative landscape.

‘The Blossom’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, print hand-coloured with watercolour, by William Blake, Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

The poem paintings were born out of consultations Clarke Hall had with neurologist Dr. Henry Head (1861-1940) following a breakdown in her mental health in 1919. Head encouraged Clarke Hall to revive her art practice and unearth her emotions around her fraught marriage at the age of just nineteen. This had waylaid her art career shortly after her graduation from the Slade School of Fine Art, when her husband did not keep his promise to support her vocation.

With Head’s help, Clarke Hall was able to establish her own studio in London in 1922, separate from her rural Essex home, where she began to create her poem paintings. Enabling more regular exhibitions, the studio would be transformative for both her personal and professional life. The remarkable studies she had made over decades in response to Wuthering Heights (1947) by Emily Brontë, perhaps the body of work she is most known for today, gained a wider audience and entered public collections. It is striking that Blake’s influence on Clarke Hall manifested most directly during this era of renewal.

Clarke Hall did not develop an expansive mythic world and philosophy through her artwork as Blake did. Yet his inspiration shines through her lyrical poetry with its rhyming, frequent categorisation as ‘songs’, and use of archaic words like ‘thy’ and ‘thee’. She owned copies of Blake’s poems and would often quote from them.

Combining loss, despair and unfulfilled love with a delight in nature and a desire for freedom, Clarke Hall’s poems often explore the entwined relationship between the dual themes of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) and its subtitle: ‘the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’. ‘Epitaph’, from the ‘Songs of Forgetting’ included in her first collection Poems (1926), contains the verse:

Youth had sorrows, sweet and deep,

Very fair were they;

Joys that out of sorrows leap,

Loving to be gay;

All are lying in my soul,

Youth and age a perfect whole,

Life is written, wrap the scroll

For some future day.

I find it moving how Blake’s importance to Clarke Hall is expressed in her only public statement about her self-perception as an artist. In a letter published in the Evening News in February 1924, she responded to discussions surrounding her recent exhibition at the Redfern Gallery on the fates of women artists burdened by domesticity. She was objecting to sensationalist headlines such as ‘Woman Painter’s Romance – Art Sacrificed to Motherhood’. Placed under the heading ‘Should Clever Women Marry?’, Clarke Hall’s letter rejected the idea that marriage and maternity had stifled her creativity. Instead, she urged every woman with children who ‘possesses gifts’ to remember that ‘her responsibility lies also in the development of those powers in herself which are her true expression’:

This makes simple an apparent complexity. It seems that my work as an artist has given me pleasure because it is intimate with life and imagination

Clarke Hall ended by paraphrasing a passage found in the prophetical epic Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c. 1804-1820), aligning herself with the perspective of her beloved poet-painter predecessor:

as William Blake says […] ‘I know no other Christianity but this, the liberty of mind and body to use the divine arts of the imagination … for what is life but Art and Science?

*

A selection of Edna Clarke Hall’s poem paintings are currently being exhibited at Abbot and Holder Gallery in London until Saturday 11 April.

Eiderdown books has recently released a beautiful edition of Wuthering Heights illustrated by Clarke Hall.

*

Iona Glen

I am a PhD researcher and writer based in Cardiff. My AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership looks at the journeys of the artist Augustus John (1878-1961) and his collections in Wales.

I’ve just started sharing some of my writing on Substack (Where Things Connect | Substack), and it actually feels very close to what I share with St James’s Church.