Daphne Hardy-Henrion
Daphne Hardy-Henrion was a sculptor particularly known for her clay, plaster, terracotta and bronze portrait heads and figure groups. Following private tuition in sculpture, the Royal Academy Schools (1934–7) admitted her at age fifteen, and by the age of twenty she had won the Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship. Her early training in France and Italy focused on Renaissance sculptural techniques and ideas. She described her work as ‘entirely traditional and not at all intellectual, being a direct expression of my perception of people and situations’. Accolades include two portrait heads in The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (1941), a solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery (1946), and a commissioned sculpture for the Festival of Britain (1951). She spent her final years at Newnham in Cambridge, maintaining a steady output of commissioned portraits until her deteriorating eyesight made it impossible to do so. Hardy-Henrion is also known for her translation of Darkness at Noon by the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, whom she had met in Paris in 1938.
