Elsie McNaught

The few existing sources of published information about Elsie McNaught indicate that she was a student at the Slade School before the First World War. The Studio Magazine's 'Art School Notes' lists her as among the Slade students who received a distinction in drawing for the year 1907-8 (Vol.44, no.185, August 1908, p.235), and Emma Chambers' study on the Slade's Summer composition competitions highlights McNaught's A Frieze of Figures Standing in a Landscape for an unrecorded composition title in 1910. (Redefining History Painting in the Academy: The Summer Composition Competition at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1898 -1922; online article, Manchester University Press, p.93).

A pastel portrait by McNaught of Dora Carrington at the Slade is reproduced in Noel Carrington's study of his sister. McNaught's continued tendency towards the decorative and graphic arts is suggested both by her wood-engraving in the collection of Central St.Martin's College of Art and Design, and the record of her working as a designer for Tootal in the 1920s, under T.C. Dugdale. (Lesley Jackson, Twentieth-Century Pattern Design, New York 2002). McNaught is recorded as exhibiting with the New English Art Club between 1910 and 1920.