Edith Hayllar

Edith Hayllar (1860–1948) was a British artist born to James Hayllar,[1] an acclaimed Victorian artist known for his genre paintings. Edith Hayllar’s family was comprised completely of artists including her three sisters: Jessica, Mary and Kate. Together, residing in an estate in Wallingford England, all four girls followed a strict Victorian regime of four to ten art classes a day to ensure proper mastery of basic art techniques such as proportions. In addition to their rigorous training schedule the girls spent the rest of their time at the estate engaging in relaxing activities such as outdoor sports, plain air painting, and gardening. These leisurely domestic scenes became the subject of the sisters’ most renowned paintings.[2]

Edith Hayllar
Self portrait
Born1860 (1860)
Died1948 (aged 87–88)
NationalityBritish
Known forPainting
MovementNeoclassicism
Spouse(s)Bruce MacKay

Of all the sisters Jessica Hayllar and Edith Hayllar where the most well-known painters, both specializing in genre painting like their father. Edith Hayllar’s paintings, unlike other female artists at the time, did not challenge the terms of "feminine dependency" but rather played an integral role in shaping the representation of women and domesticity together by painting scenes of women tucked away in domestic interiors with their families. Hayllar’s painting style emphasized symmetry and orderliness, showing women running a well-organized household and clearly delineating a woman’s place at any given time in their lives.[2]

Hayllar had paintings shown almost ever year from the 1880s–1890s at the Institute for Oil Painters and Dudley’s Gallery. In the year 1881 she had her first piece exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in London and then a year later, in 1882, another piece was shown in the Royal Academy of Arts. Of all her paintings Edith Hayllar’s most famous is a piece, entitled "A Summer Shower" from 1883, showing a man with a badminton racket courting a girl reclining in a chair next to him and was called "one of the most charming genre scenes of the nineteenth century."[3] She quit painting when she married Rev. Bruce MacKay in approximately 1900.[4]

References
  1. Benezit Dictionary of Artists
  2. "Edith Hayllar 1860 - 1948". The Clara database. National Museum of Women in the Arts. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  3. Olsen, Kirstin (1994). Chronology of Women's History (1st ed.). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 150. ISBN 0-313-28803-8. Edith Hayllar.
  4. Harris, Ann Sutherland; Nochlin, Linda. Women Artists: 1550–1950. Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 1976, p. 258.
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