Grace Golden

Free Speech

1940

Not on display

Artist: Grace Golden 1904–1993
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 406 × 559 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1940
Reference: N05338

Display caption

Grace Golden was born in London and studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1936-40 and made a career as a book illustrator, concentrating on theatrical subjects and scenes of London life. This view of the crowds at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, near to Marble Arch, was one of her first oil paintings. She worked more usually in the media of watercolour or wood engraving because of her training as an illustrator. The artist recalled that she had seen the principal speakers many times at Speakers Corner and that the woman speaker in the foreground belonged to a sect called the Pillar of Fire.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

N05338 FREE SPEECH 1940

Inscr. ‘Grace Golden’ b.r.
Canvas, 15 1/2×21 3/4 (39×55).
Chantrey Purchase from the artist 1940.
Exh: R.A., 1940 (443).

Painted in 1940. The scene is in Hyde Park near Marble Arch where orators hold forth. The woman speaker in the foreground belonged to a sect called the Pillar of Fire (letter from the artist, 13 August 1957).

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I