Elsie Few

Landscape painting
Bradfields, 1947
Tate

Elsie Evelyn Few (4 February 1909 – 17 December 1980) was a Jamaican-born artist who moved to London. She was the daughter of Jethro Few, a Cambridgeshire merchant and his first wife Evelyn Beatrice née White. She studied at the Slade in the late 1920s, and the Bartlett School of Architecture from 1929 to 1931. She painted “subtle, tonal landscapes, figures and still lifes”, and had a long association with the Euston Road School of artists, marrying one of its founder members, Claude Rogers, in 1937.[1][2][3]

Elsie was elected a member of the London Group in 1943, and from 1945 until 1948 worked for Chatto & Windus as an art editor;[4] throughout her career, Elsie also often worked as an art teacher.[2] During the late 1960s she turned her attention from figurative painting towards abstract collage, shortly before her stroke and partial paralysis. Elsie exhibited her collages at a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1973.[1][2]

A year after Elsie’s death at Haringey, London on 17 December 1980, the Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery held a memorial exhibition, which included landscapes from her Euston Road period, and her later abstract collages.[1][2]

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Works cited

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