Sculptors at the Slade
Elinor Hallé, Ellen Mary Rope, Lilian Hamilton (nee Swainson)
Philip Attwood
When the University College London’s Slade School of Art opened its doors in Bloomsbury in 1871, it provided for the first time in Britain an art college that admitted women on (almost) equal terms with men. But not only admitted, they were actually welcomed. As the college announced, ‘the buildings and their approaches have … been carefully designed in such a way as to make due provision for the admission of Ladies as Students’. As a result of this policy, a sizeable number of young women artists enrolled, and at the beginning of the 1880s, when sculpture was first introduced into the curriculum, women accounted for slightly more than half the admissions.
An important part of the school’s sculpture curriculum was the designing and modelling of cast medals. In this the students were encouraged to follow the precedent set by such figures of the Italian Renaissance as Antonio Pisano, known as Pisanello (c.1394-1455), the artist credited with making the first medals. Prominent among those who took up medal-making at the Slade were the women students and, when a competition was held and the student medals were shown at the International Inventions Exhibition in 1885, it was the women who took all the prizes and who dominated the Class 1 category.
First prize in the competition went to Elinor Hallé (1856-1926) for her medal of Cardinal Newman, an example of which is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Hallé was the daughter of the conductor and founder of the Hallé orchestra, Charles Hallé. She had already won a student prize for a sculpted vase, but from 1882 medals were her specialism and she continued to make them after she left the college. A superb example is the medal of Henry Morton Stanley, that she was commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society to make in 1890. A gold example was presented to the explorer by the Prince of Wales at a ceremony held in the Albert Hall on 5 May 1890. The men who had accompanied and the families of those who had died during the expedition to Africa received bronze versions.
As well as making medals and other sculpture, Hallé also worked as an enameller, silversmith and jeweller, showing her work at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the New Gallery, the Royal Academy, and also in Paris. In 1893 she collaborated with another sculptor who had studied at the Slade, Ellen Mary Rope (1855-1934), on a relief for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She also took part in organising exhibitions. During the First World War her modelling skills were put to a new use, when she devised ways of making adjustable splints for wounded soldiers; for this work she was awarded a CBE.
Another woman who studied at the Slade around the same time as Hallé was Lilian Swainson (1865-1939), who in 1886 married the painter Vereker Hamilton (1856-1931). The couple had met when they were both students at the college. Like Hallé, Lilian Swainson had contributed a medal of Cardinal Newman to the 1885 exhibition. Whilst marriage could often put an end to a woman’s artistic career, Hamilton (as she had become) was able to continue her work, with her husband actively encouraging her to continue making medals. Although many of her peers turned, like Hallé, to other branches of the arts and crafts, Hamilton continued to produce medals, exhibiting them at the Royal Academy into the 1920s. As well as continuing to make cast medals, she also produced models for struck medals, which could be produced in much larger numbers. Struck medals such as those she made for the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs ensured a steady income, with Hamilton producing the models and also coordinating the various individuals and companies required for the finished product.
‘© The Trustees of the British Museum’
Whilst some of the women who attended the Slade School in the 1880s seem not to have continued with their art, at least in the public realm, others beside Hallé and Hamilton went on to pursue successful artistic careers. These include Feodora Gleichen (1861-1922), who became a well-known sculptor; her statue of Queen Victoria can be seen outside Kensington Palace. There are also the sisters Ella and Nelia Casella (1858-1946 and 1859-1950 respectively), who became well-known for their work in coloured wax. It was in the footsteps of these women that artists such as Gwen John (1876-1939), who attended the Slade in the 1890s, trod.
Philip Attwood worked in the British Museum’s Department of Coins and Medals for 41 years, serving as Keeper of Coins and Medals from 2010 to 2020. Since 2012 he has been president of the Fédération Internationale de la Médaille d’Art (FIDEM).
Attwood, Philip. ‘Elinor Hallé’, The Medal, 6, 1985, pp. 16-22, online at https://www.academia.edu/45607506/Elinor_Halle
Attwood, Philip. ‘The Slade Girls’, British Numismatic Journal, 56, 1986, pp. 148-77, online at https://www.britnumsoc.org/publications/Digital%20BNJ/pdfs/1986_BNJ_56_10.pdf
Attwood, Philip. ‘Women and medallic art in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain’, in Marjorie Trusted with Joanna Barnes, Discovering women sculptors. PSSA Publishing, forthcoming 2023.
Vandenbrouck, Melanie. ‘Whatever shines should be observed. Astronomical prize medals’, The Medal, 70, 2017, pp. 21-35 (for the Casella sisters).
Thomas, Zoë. Women art workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Manchester University Press, 2020.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG109173 (for Hallé)
https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib5_1207150652 (for Hallé)
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG109196 (for Hamilton)
https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1204844969 (for Hamilton)
https://pallant.org.uk/perspectives-unfulfilled-potential-women-artists-slade/ (for some of Gwen John’s contemporaries)