Moonlight - Blackout, Sept 1939. Battersea from Chelsea

Clifford Hall was born in Wandsworth, London and studied at Richmond Art School before going to the Royal Academy Schools on a Landseer Scholarship, 1926-7. In 1928 he went to Paris to study under Andre Lhote. Returning to England in the 1930s he moved into 8 Trafalgar Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea and established himself as a painter of street scenes and portraits. At the outbreak of the war he joined a stretcher party near Lots Road and made several independent submissions to the War Artists Advisory Committee. In 1941 he showed a group of works at the Leger Gallery entitled Exhibition of War Drawings ”“ Bombs On Chelsea. Some his drawings from this period depicting the effect of air raids in Chelsea are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. The current work, painted in September 1939 at the outbreak of war, shows the blacked out factories of Battersea as seen from the Chelsea bank near Battersea Bridge. The spire of St Mary’s Church, Battersea is just visible to the right.