In the Footsteps of painter Richard Hall

How did Richard Hall's English father and Swiss-French mother come to live in Finland in the 19th century? Depending on the source, the details vary, but in any case, the story must begin with Hall's grandfather John Hall of Tredennick. The most comprehensive information about Richard Hall's family roots can be found in an article published in Finnish newspaper Satakunnan Kansa on 12 September 1937, written while the artist was still alive. The article was written under the pseudonym Arctoterrannus. The information in this post is based on that article unless otherwise stated. Grandfather John Hall of Tredennick The personal history of Grandfather Hall is described in the Finnish blog Kadonnutta aikaa (Lost Time). John Hall was born on 6 May 1785 in London and his family owned the Tredneck estate in Middlesex County, England. At some point in his life John Halll moved to St Petersburg, and later from there to Finland. According to geni.com , he had eight children in total...

    A view from the Ateneum's collection exhibition A Question of Time. On the left Gallen-Kallela's Démasquée, center Antell´s portrait by the same artist, on the right Hall's Odalisque. On top Charles-François Daubigny's The Rising Moon on the River Bank. While exploring the archives of the National Gallery, I also got to see Richard Hall's painting Odalisque. It was on display in the Ateneum's exhibition The Question of Time, in a section on the H. F. Antell collection. Among others, the well-known Démasquée by Akseli Gallen-Kallela from 1888 was hung in the same set. The collector Antell's order Herman Frithiof Antell (1847-1893) was born in Vaasa and trained as a doctor. During his lifetime, he amassed important collections of coins, artefacts and works of art with the help of a million-dollar inheritance from his father. From 1877 he had a permanent residence in Paris. Tuukka Talvio has written in Finnish a comprehensive and detailed biography of Antel...

Peter Paul Rubens: The Three Graces, (1620-1624)     Already in early spring I was in contact with the research services of the Finnish National Gallery, because they were about to move their collection. As a result, the archival material had to be ordered in advance so that it could be viewed in the summer. A lot of material was there, including newspaper clippings, a few letters written by Hall and literature in which the artist is mentioned. Let's start with the letters: they concerned a painting that had been in an exhibition at the Finnish Art Society, and which Hall wanted to find. Rubens' The Three Graces Hall studied at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts from 1875 to 1881. During his studies, he probably painted a copy of The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Copies of paintings by old masters were a common practice in art education at the time. It was a way of familiarising oneself with the masters' painting techniques and treatment of the subject matt...

 Clues from the past The story of painter Richard Hall (1860-1942) came up six years ago in a newspaper article in the archives of the Pori Art Museum where I worked. The article had appeared in a Finnish newspaper Satakunnan Kansa in 1975. In it, Mauri R. Hall, the grandson of the artist's brother, recounted the life of this artist who had been forgotten in the mists of history. At the time, I researched Hall's life story on the Internet and wrote an article about him for the Finnish Wikipedia.   Richard Hall: La classe manuelle. École de petites filles (Finistère), 1889 Musée des beaux-Arts de Rennes A variable life Richard Hall's life turned out to be quite interesting: his father was British, his mother Swiss-French. Born in Pori, Finland, Hall's family moved to Helsinki in the 1960s, then to London and Stockholm. Richard Hall studied at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts. In 1881, aged only 21, he won a history painting competition organised by the Swedish A...