Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938 reserved Medium Details: Oil pastel

Medium Details: Oil pastel

a bright and promising student she married soon after graduation and moved to Cornwall never to be heard of again

This painting is currently with our framers so will be ready to ship in approximately three weeks' time

Her studio sale in a Cornish auction house said as much as any museum retrospective could about the trajectory of her career

Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938 reserved Medium Details: Oil pastelSomehow portraits of women by women artists of the early twentieth century have a certain historical frisson. When this was painted in 1938, the Great War had been over for two decades and the societal changes it wrought had led to political and social freedoms that would have been unthinkable to many women at the turn of the century. Elsa would have known a world of corsets and stays in 1880s Boston, a lifetime away from the simple black evening