Elsa Vaudrey (née Dun) was born in Glasgow in 1905 to a Scottish father and Bavarian mother. She attended the Glasgow School of Art, where she studied under Ancell Stronach. She was at the heart of the London art scene in the 1950s and '60s and exhibited regularly at the Redfern Gallery, and although she became best known for her atmospheric and lyrical abstract paintings, she also produced figurative work, mainly still lives and landscapes.
Painter Elsa Vaudrey (née Dun) was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1905 to a Scottish father and Bavarian mother. Her mother was nearly 50 when she was born, and her father, a heart specialist, nearly 70. She started to paint at an early age, while she was attending the Mount Quaker School for Girls at York. From 1924–27 she trained at the Glasgow School of Art under Ancell Stronach. In 1935 she held her first solo exhibition at the Storran Gallery in London (whose director from 1932 was the Viennese-born Ala Story (Emilie Anna Maria Ema Heyszl von Heyszenau)). In 1937 Vaudrey married her second husband, the artist Peter Barker-Mill. Peterʼs second name was Vaudrey and Elsa adopted the name when signing her pictures. In 1939 she contributed watercolours of architectural subjects to the Annual Exhibition of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which were singled out by the Times (The Times 1939, p. 12).
During the Second World War Barker-Mill served in the Civil Defence Camouflage Unit, while Vaudrey ran the house for the vegetarian Stonefield Maternity Home, evacuated from Blackheath, where hundreds of babies were born. In those years, Vaudrey became a close friend of the Polish artist Peter Potworowski, who with his wife lodged in converted stables in the grounds of Vaudrey’s Somerset home, Wookey House, near Wells; she also became friends with with Polish refugee painter, Jankel Adler, with whom she corresponded and who was another exhibitor with the Redfern Gallery. In 1946 she went to Rome where she had a successful exhibition and met the renowned Italian Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Later that year she had a joint exhibition with Potworowski in Perugia. In April 1947 she had her first exhibition at the Redfern – watercolours and gouaches – jointly with Derwent Lees, Bryan Wynter and Michael Rothenstein. The art critic Roger Marvell wrote of her sense of colour and compared her to Frances Hodgkins, although noting that her composition was 'apt to be feeble and flyaway' (Marvell 1947, p. 293). The Times praised her 'emphatic rhythm in the handling', as well as the contrast between her vigour and the 'considerable delicacy of colour' (The Times, 1947). Maurice Collis in Time and Tide wrote of the 'sentiment of joyʼ that her landscapes inspired, with the encouragement that 'she will enormously improve in technique if she works hard and continuously' (Time and Tide, 1947).
Many other exhibitions at the Redfern followed. In 1955 she exhibited experimental oils and watercolours, and The Times noted the odd angles of her compositions and her ability to render everyday objects 'with the same impulsive strokes of the brush so that the forms are broken up and put together again to form a wild' and dramatic pattern (The Times 1955, p. 5). Her 1957 solo show was praised for its 'imaginative sense of height, movement' and 'oceanic space' (The Times 1957, p. 16). In 1959 she exhibited over 30 paintings, The Guardian art critic Eric Newton noting some resemblances to the work of late Turner and praising Vaudrey’s ‘pure and intense’ vision. He also added that ‘Colour, rather than texture, is the basis of her paintings […] The form, never explicit but never purely abstract, seems to emerge tentatively, as though the colour had created it as an afterthought, just as in certain lyrics the central theme forces its way to the surface through the dominant theme’ (Newton 1959, p. 9). Her last solo show at the Redfern was held in 1962, when The Observer art critic Neville Wallis described it as a ‘return of a highly romantic painter with mystical or natural themes such as harbour reflections’ (Wallis 1962, p. 24).
Although Vaudrey became best known for her atmospheric and lyrical abstract paintings, she also produced figurative work, mainly still lives and landscapes. She was often inspired by her immediate surroundings, such as Wookey Hole in Somerset (close to where she lived with her husband), Chelsea in London, the Welsh countryside, as well as the places she visited abroad, including Rome, Sicily, Bavaria, Antibes and Jerusalem. Elsa Vaudrey died in London, England on 21st June 1990, the day after her 85th birthday. The same year, a retrospective exhibition was held at the Fine Art Society in London. There are no public UK collections holding works by Vaudrey. The first monograph on her, written by Mel Gooding and Raleigh Trevelyan, was published by Sansom & Co in 2018.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Elsa Vaudrey]
Publications related to [Elsa Vaudrey] in the Ben Uri Library