Soft Lights and Sweet Music: Photographs of Elisabeth Welch
Past display archive
5 March - 25 October 2009
Room 31 case display
Free
Elisabeth Welch
by Humphrey Spender
June 1933
NPG x131702
In the 1930s Ivor Novello wrote songs for Welch, Paul Robeson was her leading man in films, and she enjoyed popularity as a cabaret star of London’s café society.
From 1934 to 1936 the BBC broadcast her own radio series Soft Lights and Sweet Music. When the war broke out in 1939 Welch decided to remain in her adopted country, and support the British war effort, entertaining the armed forces.
In the post-war years, Welch starred in three sophisticated revues in London’s West End: Tuppence Coloured (1947), in which she sang Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’, Oranges and Lemons (1949), and Penny Plain (1951).
In 1979 Welch’s appearance in Derek Jarman’s film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (singing ‘Stormy Weather’) won her new fans. At the age of eighty-one she returned to the Broadway stage, and her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood earned her a nomination for a Tony award.
Welch did not fit the definition of jazz, torch, pop, or ballad singer but defined her art quite simply as ‘telling a story in song’.
Elisabeth Welch: Soft Lights and Sweet Music by Stephen Bourne (Scarecrow Press, 2005) is available from the National Portrait Gallery bookshop. The National Portrait Gallery has recently acquired this group of vintage prints of Elisabeth Welch from Stephen Bourne, who has provided the accompanying text and additional contextual material.
Related portraits
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131693)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131694)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131695)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131703)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131689)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131690)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131704)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131696)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131697)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131701)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131698)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131699)
- Elisabeth Welch (NPG x131700)