Olga Edwardes

Her father was Joseph Michael Solomon (1883–1920), an architect partner of Herbert Baker, but he committed suicide in 1920 at the age of 33, in Cape Town.[3]

Her mother was Jean Elizabeth Emily Cox née Hamilton (1885–1946), a South African actress, who was a divorcée (at least twice) when she married Solomon in 1914 in Cape Town.[4][5] They also had a son, Paul Lionel Joseph (1918–1987).[6]

Her mother married again in Cape Town in 1922 to Hugh Edwards (1887-?), a company secretary,[7] who thus became the stepfather of Olga and Paul.

Olga Edwardes married P/O Anthony Max Baerlein in 1941, but he was killed in action later the same year.[upper-alpha 1][10][11][12][13]

In 1946, she married her second husband Nicholas Davenport,[upper-alpha 2] an economist and journalist who was more than twenty years her senior.[2] He died in 1979; she died in Elstree in 2008.

Olga Edwards, or maybe Olga Solomon, first exhibited paintings in Cape Town at aged about 15. A year later, she came to England with her mother and her brother, where she wanted to study painting, acting and ballet, and danced in the corps de ballet in a company of Anton Dolin.

Edwardes appeared in several films and plays from the mid-1930s into the mid-1950s.

Since her marriage in 1946, she led a new career, as salonnière in the house of Hinton Waldrist manor. Her husband had bought it in 1922,[upper-alpha 4] and together they entertained and held court to influential and radical artists, economists, philosophers, and politicians of the day at grand gatherings. Both she and her husband were long-time leading Fabians – she had known Harold Laski for some time. Nicholas Davenport worked with Alexander Korda then joined Harold Wilson with the National Film Finance Corporation. Even though a Fabian,[upper-alpha 5] he still kept friendships with R. J. G. Boothby and was close to Winston Churchill.

Olga Davenport continued the social activity of salon gathering which had been part of history for more than 350 years.[upper-alpha 6] "She was, as a young woman, an astounding beauty. She was also an impressive creative force. It is a heady combination. Men chucked caution to the wind."[10] There is a bust of 'Olga' by the sculptor F. E. McWilliam; two portrait drawings of her in her art collection by Theyre Lee‑Elliott, and another gouache drawing of her dancing also by Lee‑Elliott, with a verse by the artist on the reverse dedicated to her. His was not the only verse inspired by Olga's muse: another was from A. P. Herbert on the train to and back from Frinton-on-Sea.

She had been trained in painting, and returned to that art form following her acting career. In fact when she entered into the theatre, between performances she studied at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and through him and his wife,[upper-alpha 7] met Matthew Smith and Ivon Hitchens. In 1956, following a career as an actor with mostly minor roles in films, she returned to studying fine art and painting at the Chelsea Polytechnic; at the Royal College of Art; and at Peter Lanyon's school in St Ives, Cornwall. Davenport was not merely an accomplished artist, or a collector; but her deep friendships with British artists from the 1950s onwards placed Davenport as a key and perhaps surprisingly influential figure in the British art scene of the time. In St Ives, Davenport was to meet and befriend some of the greatest British artists of the 20th century and during her life she acquired important paintings for her own collection, including works by Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, and William Scott. She spent hours at Eagle's Nest, and Elm Tree Cottage. She sat on the board of the Bear Lane Gallery and formed relationships with influential people such as Clement Greenberg and Pauline Vogelpoel. She had a studio in the south of France.[upper-alpha 8]

She exhibited with the London Group and with the Women's International Art Club. She had shown in a number of group exhibitions including an Arts Council tour, at the Leicester Galleries, at the Whitechapel, the A. I. A., the Drian Gallery,[36] Galerie Creuse, Paris, Athens School of Fine Arts, 'Women in the Arts Today' at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, Grabowski Gallery,[37] and at the Demarco Gallery.

She had two one-person shows at the Piccadilly Gallery in London's Cork Street in 1969,[upper-alpha 9] and in 1976;[upper-alpha 10][38] and in 1978 she had a solo show of oils at the Oxford Gallery.[upper-alpha 11]

Her later work was mainly concerned with the depiction of landscape, and is recognised for the use of gentle, yet dynamic colours which reduce forms to abstracted shapes. She used broad, fluid brushstrokes of colour to capture the outlines of natural environments. The painted landscapes embody a delicate compromise between the wholly self-involved abstraction of modernist formalism and a fascination with the experience and representation of the natural world. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Nuffield Foundation, St Anne's College, Oxford, University of Warwick, Department of the Environment, and in private collections in England, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium and the United States of America.

After her death, her art collection auctioned around £550,000 (equivalent to £784,800 in 2021).[39][40]