Erlund Hudson

After the war Hudson designed costumes and scenery for Sadler's Wells and Ballet Rambert. This interest in ballet led Hudson to meet Nesta Brooking, who had opened a ballet school in Primrose Hill. Hudson became the Brooking School of Ballet's artistic director. As well as colleagues, the two became lifelong companions, and shared their lives until Brooking's death in 2006, aged 99. With the musical director Norman Higgins, Hudson and Brookings worked on projects with Cecchetti scholars and with the BBC as well as producing Brooking's own shows. Hudson was also a fine portrait painter, working mainly in watercolours and continued to exhibit in Britain, Scandinavia, Canada and the United States. In the 1960s she resigned from the various artistic societies she was a member of and worked as a restorer for The Rocking Horse, an antiques shop in St. John's Wood. In 2002, the Black Star Press reprinted some of her finest etching plates. In 2007, the Imperial War Museum held a party in her honour, which she attended with two of her contemporaries, Phyllis Diamond and Malvina Cheek. Their conversation was recorded by the BBC and broadcast as a Woman's Hour programme. As well as the Imperial War Museum, works by Hudson are held in the collections of the British Museum, Dudley Museum and Art Gallery, the Wellcome Library, the National Gallery of Canada and the Yale Center for British Art.

Erlund Hudson was born in St Marychurch, near Torquay in Devon. She was the youngest of seven children to Henry Hudson, a businessman from Liverpool, and Helen Ingeborg Olson, a Norwegian-American from Boston. At the age of ten she was confined to bed for a year with a spinal injury and spent much of her time drawing. She attended Torquay School of Art before securing a place in the school of engraving at the Royal College of Art, RCA. She studied under Malcolm Osborne and Robert Austin. She gained her diploma in 1937, won drawing prizes, a continuation scholarship and an RCA travelling scholarship. In 1937, while still a student, Hudson was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, and to the Royal Watercolour Society in 1939. She travelled throughout Italy in 1938 and 1939, but seemingly unaware of the developing political situation she only returned to Britain days before the outbreak of the Second World War and so avoided internment in Italy.

Eleanor Hudson, known professionally as Erlund Hudson, (18 February 1912 – 9 March 2011), was a British artist. Hudson was a watercolourist, etcher and designer and is notable for her depictions of women at work during the Second World War and for her post-war paintings of ballet dancers.