Private
Edward Halliday
(1902 - 1984)
Self Portrait
Sold
Edward Halliday (1902 - 1984)
Signed, and dated,
Inscribed Altar
inscribed 1 inch to a 1 foot.
ink and gouache on paper
Size:
Height – 76.2cm
Width – 43.2cm
Exhibited: WW2 – War Pictures by British Artists, Morley College London, 28 October -23 November 2016, cat 122.
Literature: WW2 – War Pictures by British Artists, Edited by Sacha Llewellyn & Paul Liss, July 2016, cat 122, page 163.
Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.386.
During the war Halliday worked as an air traffic controlled for the RAF and later was transferred to Intelligence and worked on intercepting German radio signals. Altar offers a deeply personal and kaleidoscopic vision of war and peace. Conceived in 1939 for an unidentified (and presumably never completed) altar the dominance of the disproportionately large central figure of Christ recalls that of Hypnos in Evening on the Roman Campagna, which though painted in 1928, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the same year that this composition was conceived.
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.
