Leila Faithfull

Leila Faithfull (née Reynolds) (1896-1994) was a British artist, who throughout her career worked in a variety of media and who is best known for the artworks she produced during the Second World War, depicting events in Britain.

Biography

Evacuees Growing Cabbages (Art.IWM ART.LD 428) (1940)

Faithfull was born in Lancashire but was brought up in Liverpool where her father, Sir James Reynolds, had business interests. She married George Faithfull in 1917. and after his death she married, in 1943, the writer and critic Cuthbert Worsley.[1]

Faithfull studied at the Slade School of Art throughout 1923 and 1924, before going to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. At the start of World War Two, Faithfull applied to work for the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC. Although not given a full-time commission by WAAC, she was given facilities and permits to work. She used these to produce paintings depicting evacuee children and, later, scenes of American servicemen playing baseball in a London park, and these pieces were purchased by WAAC.[2][3] During the war, Faithfull also worked for a time as a surgical artist at the new plastic surgery unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead under Sir Archibald McIndoe.[1] At the end of the war, Faithfull produced a triptych depicting the crowds gathered around Buckingham Palace, celebrating on VE-Day.[4][2][5]

After the war, Faithfull built a reputation as a portrait painter and exhibited widely with works shown at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the New English Art Club. Both Kenneth Clark and Sir Edward Marsh acquired examples of her work for their private collections.[1] In her later years she begin working in metal, creating figures of dancers and horses. Faithfull died in 1994 at St. Angelia's Convent in Bristol, where she had lived for several years.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 David Buckman (1998). Artists in Britain Since 1945 Vol 1, A to L. Art Dictionaries Ltd. ISBN 0 95326 095 X.
  2. 1 2 Catherine Speck (2014). Beyond the Battlefield, Women Artists of Two World Wars. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 178023 374 1.
  3. ↑ Merion Harries; Susie Harries (1983). The War Artists, British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century. Michael Joseph, The Imperial War Museum & the Tate Gallery. ISBN 0 7181 2314 X.
  4. ↑ Art from the Second World War. Imperial War Museum. 2007. ISBN 978-1-904897-66-8.
  5. ↑ Imperial War Museum. "Correspondence with artists, Mrs L Faithfull". Imperial War Museum. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
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