FEW, Elsie Evelyn

1909 - 1980

Elsie Evelyn Few was born at 'Willowsmere', Marescant Road, Cross Roads PO, Kingston, Jamaica on 4 February 1909, daughter of Jethro Few, a merchant, who was born at 'Sunnyside', Chesterton, Cambridgeshire in 1866 and died in Jamaica on 7 December 1941, and his first wife Evelyn Beatrice née White, who married at Kingston, Jamaica on 17 September 1902, and who died at St Andrew, Jamaica on 3 February 1919, and from their Cambridgeshire home they made frequent visits to their home in Jamaica with their two children Elsie and her younger brother, Arthur White (19 August 1910-21 June 1960), they had another daughter Margerie Gladys Few (born in Jamaica on 18 August 1914). Jethro married secondly at Chesterton in 1921, Annie Elizabeth Bullard (born c.1878). Elsie returned to England and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in Paris, also at the Bartlett School of Architecture 1929-1931, before travelling and studying in Europe and exhibited at the Burnett Webster Gallery in Kingston, Jamaica in 1936. She married at Marylebone, London in 1937, Claude Maurice Rogers but continued paint as Elsie Few. Associated with the Euston Road School and with their exhibition at Wakefield City Art Gallery and in 1939, a training college lecturer on art, living at Rodwell House, Baylham, Ipswich with her husband Claude, also an artist painter. Elected a member of the London Group of Artists in 1943 and worked for Chatto & Windus as an art editor 1943-1945. A painter in oil, artist in collage and teacher, she exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1973 and at Christopher Hull's Annex Gallery, Wimbledon in 1979. For a time, Elsie was a member of the London Group of Artists and the Royal West of England Academy, and a senior lecturer and head of department at Gipsy Hill Training College 1946-1969. She and her husband lived for many years at Somerton, near Sudbury, Suffolk but Elsie Evelyn Rogers died at 36 Southwood Lane, Haringey, London N.6, on 17 December 1980. There was a memorial exhibition at Bury St Edmund's Art Gallery, which included landscapes from her Euston Road period, and abstract collages which she had begun to create in 1968, shortly before her stroke and partial paralysis. The Belgrave Gallery held a joint exhibition of works by Rogers and Few in 2002.

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Works by This Artist