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Daphne Todd (b.1947)
Me in a magnifying mirror, 2001
Oil on skin plywood, 410 x 410mm (1618 x 1618")
Collection of the artist
Daphne Todd was born in Yorkshire
and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under Sir William
Coldstream (1908-87) from 1964 to 1971. Whilst there she
was awarded the British Institute Award for Figurative Painting,
the Tonks Drawing Prize and the intercollegiate David Murray
Award for landscape painting. She exhibited at the Royal Academy
from 1969 onwards and taught at the Byam Shaw and the Heatherley
Schools of Art. In 1984 she was elected a member of the New English
Art Club and in 1985 of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
She has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom, including winning
first prize in the Hunting/Observer Award in 1984, second prize
in 1983 for the John Player Portrait Award, and exhibiting solo
in 1989 at the Morley Gallery, London. In 1994 Daphne Todd was
elected the first woman president of the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters, an office she held for six years. (The Society was
founded in 1891 and past presidents include Sir William Orpen,
Sir John Lavery and Augustus John.)
Todd has often been preoccupied with the framing of the subject
within the space of the picture plane, as in her portrait of
the tall figure of Christopher Ondaatje in the National Portrait
Gallery's collection, caught (almost jammed) within the doorway
of his library. In her self-portrait the round magnifying mirror
acts as a centralising device separating the various aspects
of her life: outside the sunset of a Sussex landscape and the
watery pools of her farm, and inside the abstract colours of
the interior space. The splitting of this painting into four
parts suggests the juggling of the different parts of life -
the 'real' (outdoor, outer, physical) versus the 'abstract' (inside,
internal, cerebral). It is a bold and knowing work, specific,
powerful, complex yet modest in scale. It is typical in palette,
with the familiar and strange mixtures of oranges with pinks
and indigo/violets that have become her trademark. Todd has work
in many public collections including the Science Museum, the
Royal Academy (Chantrey Bequest), the Royal Holloway Museum and
Art Gallery, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
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