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Hilda Fearon (14 September 1878 – 2 June 1917) was an English artist who specialised in landscapes and portraits, often of mothers and children. She was born in Banstead, Surrey, and displayed an early interest in drawing and modelling.[1][2]
Hilda went on to study art in Dresden under Robert Sterl from 1897 to 1899, and then at the Slade from 1899 to 1904, under the impressionist painter Algernon Talmage;[3] Talmage taught his students to work en plein air, observing the effect of light on figures and landscapes.[2] She moved with Talmage to St Ives in Cornwall, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.[1] She also exhibited at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, of which she became a member in 1910.[2]
The art historian Alicia Foster has suggested that “the peaceful, domestic subject matter of her [Hilda’s] paintings … are likely to have given their viewers at the Royal Academy a comforting sense of continuing tradition in the midst of the 1914–18 war”.[2]
