Grace Golden pictured London. She studied at Chelsea School of Art, the Royal College of Art and the Regent Street Polytechnic, painting in oil and watercolor, and making wood engravings, illustrations and posters. Golden exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Fine Art Society and the Leicester Galleries.
In 1951 Golden's book Old Bankside was published with fifty-one illustrations depicting the history of the area. She described sketching the city during her childhood, from her family home. She wrote that she 'could see the River Thames curving between London and Blackfriars Bridges. The bank that joins them on the Surrey side is known as Bankside and towards it I feel the pride of personal possession.' Golden drew the riverside wharfs and alleyways, and the new Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern). Her work so impressed the actor and director Sam Wanamaker that he asked her to be the archivist of his project to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
Free Speech (Tate), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1940, depicts the crowds at Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner. The subject is likely to have seemed timely during the war against a regime that persecuted dissent. The War Artists' Advisory Committee gave Golden a sketching permit so that she could continue to draw the city, and bought her oil painting An Emergency Food Office, in which people queuing for ration books are observed with humorous scrutiny (Imperial War Museum}. A retrospective of Golden's work, A Londoner's London, was held at the South London Art Gallery in 1979. In the exhibition Artists' London, held at the Museum of London in 1993, Golden and the women's suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst were the only women included. |
