Erlund Hudson was one of a group of women artists who captured the quietly heroic stoicism of women working on the home front during the Second World War. Although she was not initially recruited for the Recording Britain project, an official scheme launched by Sir Kenneth Clark to make a record of everyday life in wartime, her sketches and watercolours were of such quality that they were acquired by the War Artists Advisory Committee for the Imperial War Museum, and she was invited to exhibit at the National Gallery.
Prevented from taking part in heavy war work by a childhood illness which gave her a weak spine, she spent part of the war in rural Leicestershire before returning to London in the latter part of the war where she became an emergency van driver as German flying bombs caused widespread damage to the capital. In both widely different locations she found fruitful inspiration for her work.
After the war Hudson became a designer of sets and costumes, working alongside the ballet choreographer Nesta Brooking and the musical director/composer Norman Higgins at a dance school in Primrose Hill, North London.
Eleanor Hudson was the youngest of seven children born within 11 years in Devon and her unusual alternative name, Erlund — used for professional purposes so that she would not be instantly identified as a woman artist — came from her mother’s family, Norwegians who had settled in the US.
Brought up in the rural coastal village of St Marychurch, Devon, the children were all encouraged to be creative: and her confinement, when aged 10, to bed-rest for a year following an illness gave her ample time to pursue drawing full-time. Her father Harold, a businessman from Liverpool, died when she was 11, and Hudson later gave her mother Helen credit for her success as an artist. Hudson attended a small art school in Torquay, a converted chapel where convention dictated that life models wore bathing suits half turned down for decency. Inspired to learn proper engraving, she went to the Royal College of Art where the registrar, Athel Hay, sent her to see the principal, Sir William Rothenstein.
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Recognising her talent, he allowed her through the back door to work in the renowned engraving school, under Professor Malcolm Osborne. Later it was run by Robert Austin, who became a friend and mentor. Hudson was awarded her diploma in 1937 and was able to justify fully her spontaneous admission with various drawing prizes and both a continuation and a travelling scholarship.
In 1937 she also was elected to associate membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, later to full membership, and shortly after, became an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society, gaining full membership in 1949. It gave her a mini-retrospective exhibition in 1999. She was considered good enough to apply for the Prix de Rome, as Austin had done, but her mother intervened, saying they would pay the full fees and someone else should benefit from it.
An RCA travelling scholarship took her to Italy in 1938 and 1939 anyway. Travelling in the Dolomites through the last summer before the outbreak of war, she produced some of her most interesting work to date. As tension increased across Europe, she finally heeded her mother’s pleas to return — although it needed an Italian officer to order her home with a week to spare before what could have been six years of internment.
Back in London she occupied a noisy flat in Earls Court where the air raid sirens and blasts from the falling bombs competed with the rattle of the trains of the lines below. Eventually she escaped to live with her brother Paige, the vicar of Ashby Magna in Leicestershire, and his wife Susan and helped to look after their three children. Here she found plenty of material for her work as local women did their bit for the war effort in various ways. Hudson also travelled into Leicester to work in the large canteens and to pack bundles of basic supplies for prisoners of war. Her sketchbook was always with her.
She moved to Kent to help with the family of another brother, Laurence, and on arrival found that her her sister-in-law, Linda, had gone into labour. There was no possibility of a doctor or midwife arriving in time so Hudson delivered the baby single-handed. She later recalled it as her finest achievement.
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Returning to London once more, she was asked to work as a driver at an emergency centre in Notting Hill Gate. A fleet of converted laundry vans was put on call to assist digging people out from the debris caused by flying bombs. The fogs created by plaster dust meant that at times one of her main duties was to make tea and distribute sandwiches to victims and rescuers.
Austin recommended that she sent her work to the War Artists Advisory Committee, who initially accepted six examples as a characterful record. Her work presented a lively contrast to the images by predominantly male war artists sent back from abroad. Hudson admired Stella Schmolle, who travelled far into front-line territory, but knew that her damaged spine meant she should not attempt to go abroad again to work.
The same dogged enthusiasm that characterised her war work prompted her to select as subjects women reading or preparing to dance, and she turned her hand to many areas of artistic creativity, even restoring antique rocking horses for a friend’s shop in St John’s Wood.
Her life changed direction again after a chance incident in the mid-1950s when Hudson was sketching at Sadler’s Wells. Since it was difficult to keep out of the way of the dancers in rehearsals, it was suggested that if she wanted to sketch in more congenial surroundings she should go to meet the ballet choreographer, Nesta Brooking, who had recently opened her own independent school of training in Primrose Hill.
This was the beginning of a professional collaboration and firm friendship that would last the rest of Brooking’s life. This new enthusiasm meant Hudson’s subject matter was for a while completely taken up with the ballet, and she was able to watch and draw such famous figures as Tamara Karsavina teaching Brooking’s awestruck students.
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Hudson continued to exhibit, including in Scandinavia, Canada and the US, where several museums own her work, the Smithsonian having had the foresight to acquire Woman Reading by Lamplight in 1941.
She lived in a Georgian house on the riverside at Hammersmith for more than 50 years, alongside several writers, musicians and other artists of her generation.
In the 1970s she also commissioned a modern family holiday house from the architect Wendy Harries; it was built on a turnip field overlooking the water at Bosham on the South coast. Latterly she shared a house in Kensington to care for Brooking, who died in 2006; and there she herself was cared for by a loyal band of housekeepers.
Hudson derived her inspiration from everyday subjects to which she gave the utmost attention, yet the results seem spontaneous, the stillness of her portraits appear effortlessly caught in time. Perseverance is more apparent in the engravings, a medium considered much more challenging than etching, techniques both of which she mastered assiduously.
In 2007 she visited the Imperial War Museum for a reunion with Phyllis Dimond and Malvina Cheek, fellow war artists, which was broadcast by Radio 4.
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Typically, all three were modest about their work, but a planned exhibition at the museum of the work of women artists will remind successive generations of their great cultural contribution at a momentous moment in British history.
Erlund Hudson, artist, was born on February 18, 1912. She died on March 9, 2011, aged 99