Reginald Hallward: An Artist’s Life

Reginald Hallward: An Artist’s Life

We are delighted to be offering a wide range of work by Reginald Hallward (1858-1948) for sale in Reginald Hallward: An Artist’s Life, consigned for auction by the artist’s granddaughter. Lots include oils, works on paper, and sketch books including his designs for stained-glass, and the artist’s Winsor & Newton easel. Also featured are works by his wife Adeleide and their daughter Patience.

Hallward was a prolific artist, widely known for his romantic landscapes that evoke a mythic past, who was also in demand for stained glass windows and latterly his designs for commemorative sculptures.

1.Reginald F. Hallward (British 1858-1948). The High Trees - A Clump of Trees with a distant landscape. Estimate: £4,000 - £6,000

 

He trained first at the Slade and the Royal College of Art, and then in the late 1880s with the leading Arts and Crafts stained-glass practitioner Christopher Whall at his studio in Dorking. Hallward was friends with Oscar Wilde - Basil Hallward in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was very likely named after him – and he married the painter, illustrator and author Adeleide Bloxham (1861-1925) in 1887. He exhibited his work widely: at the Royal Academy, the New English Art Club and the Royal Society of British Artists.

2. Reginald F. Hallward (British 1858-1948). Wings of a Dove - A Dove hovering over an extensive River Landscape. Estimate: £2,000 - £3,000

 

Before the First World War he was represented by the influential Dowdeswell Gallery, and showed at the Rowley Gallery. He occasionally collaborated with Adeleide, they both wrote poetry and prose, and in the early 1900s he founded the Woodlands Press at Shorne in Kent (lot 157). There he crossed paths with fellow artist and publisher James Guthrie (1874-1952), who became a close friend.

Hallward also worked in clay, designing and producing highly decorated ceramics with Adelaide and their daughter Patience (lots 162 & 163). Following the death of his wife in 1925, Hallward moved with Patience (1892-1981) to live in Wales, painting the mountainous wilds of Merioneth and Pembrokeshire (lot 159).

3. Reginald Hallward’s Winsor & Newton Studio EaselEstimate: £600 - £800

 

Hallward’s style was conditioned in part by the lingering influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and their respect for nature, and further cemented by the underlying literary foundations of Symbolism. Graves bordered by cypresses (lot 151), suggests his familiarity with painting on the Continent, and the work of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. The high trees (lot 153), celebrate an Arcadian pastoral tradition, while Wings of a dove (lot 155), offers a prescient motif in the build up to the First World War.

Hallward’s mastery of a diverse range of techniques (lots 151 & 152) chimed with the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement and its championing of a multidisciplinary approach to art and decoration as espoused by William Morris. The Victorian desire to instruct and edify also informed Hallward’s aesthetic, whether through the depiction of rolling hills or the production of a cycle of stained-glass windows. It was a moral imperative that suited the wider ambitions of the day to improve and extend Britain’s sphere of influence. But it also reflected the artist’s own Christian faith, the presence of the supernatural clearly suggested in the panoramic vistas that he composed, God’s own views of great canopies of trees stretching to the horizon that feature in his compositions, and the sense of the sublime evoked by vast landscapes punctuated by deep ravines, gushing waterfalls and swelling rivers.

 

4. Patience Hallward, a decorated tea bowl. Estimate: £100 - £200

 

Although Hallward’s aesthetic fell out of step with contemporary events, the romantic often medievalising manner of his work at odds with the emergence of the avantgarde in the early years of the twentieth century, in the wake of the First World War it was a style that leant itself to the production of memorials. As a consequence his skills as stained-glassmaker and designer were much sought after. He worked with the Imperial War Graves Commission to produce a series of tablets to honour the fallen in cathedrals and churches across England, France and Canada, including in Amiens, Rouen and Notre Dame in Paris. He completed a range of commemorative stained glass window cycles, including for the American Cemetry in Suresnes, outside Paris, and for the memorial screen at St Matthew’s Church, Ealing, and designed the war memorial cross at St Peter and St Pauls, at Shorne in Kent, to name but a very few of the multiplicity of post-War endeavours he embarked upon.

 

5. Reginald F. Hallward (British 1858-1948). Nativity scene, design for an altarpiece. Estimate: £300 - £500

 

Reginald Hallward: An Artist's Life 

Friday 9 July at 2pm

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