Elsie Few
(1909 - 1980) |
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landscapes, still lifes Art Work
| Name: |
Elsie Few |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Jamaica |
| Nationality: |
Jamaican |
| Birth: |
1909 |
| Death: |
1980 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
landscapes, still lifes |
| Medium: |
oil painting |
| Method: |
oil painting |
| Style: |
Abstraction |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
Elsie Few was born in Jamaica, and moved to London, where she studied at the Slade in the late 1920s, at the same time as William Coldstream. She painted subtle, tonal landscapes, figures and still lifes.
Few worked with the Euston Road School, and married one of its founder members, Claude Rogers. The organization of the early exhibitions of this group is a telling example of how women have been edited out of art history. Few had shared an exhibition with Rogers and Victor Pasmore at the Burnett Webster Gallery, Kingston, Jamaica, in 1936 (she had her first individual exhibition there in the same year). In 1948, her work was included in the survey show of Euston Road artists and students held at Wakefield City Art Gallery. However, when, in the same year, the Arts Council created what they called a concentrated version of the Wakefield exhibition, no women artists were included. Few's paintings, and those of Sylvia Melland, who had been a Euston Road student, were not shown. Few's portrait Thelma Painting at the Euston Road School (1938} is likely to be a painting of Thelma Hulbert, another woman who had worked at Euston Road, but was also conspicuously absent from the Arts Council exhibition.
From 1934 onwards Few exhibited with the London Group. Her career as an artist was combined with work as an art teacher. During the late 1960s Few's practice changed from figurative painting to abstract collage, which was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1973. |
Samples of Work
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