Daphne Hardy Henrion (20 October 1917 – 31 October 2003) was a British sculptor, a member of the

Royal Society of British Sculptors The Royal Society of Sculptors is a British charity established in 1905 which promotes excellence in the art and practice of sculpture. Its headquarters are a centre for contemporary sculpture on Old Brompton Road, South Kensington, London. It ...

and an intimate of the writer

Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler join ...

Life

She was born Daphne Hardy in 1917 in

Amersham Amersham ( ) is a market town and civil parish within the unitary authority of Buckinghamshire, England, in the Chiltern Hills, northwest of central London, from Aylesbury and from High Wycombe. Amersham is part of the London commuter belt. ...

, Buckinghamshire, to Major Clive Hardy, a diplomat, and his wife Judith. Between 1923 and 1931 she was educated in The Hague, at French and German schools. She left school aged 14 to study art privately in the Netherlands for a year with Marian Gobius and Albert Termote. From 1934 to 1937 she attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. In 1937 she won the school's gold medal and travelling scholarship which took her in 1938 to France and Italy. In the summer of 1939 in Paris, through mutual friends she met the Hungarian writer

and they became close. Her life with him just before and after the outbreak of the Second World War is described in Koestler's autobiography '' Scum of the Earth'' in which she appears as 'G'. At the outbreak of the war in 1939 she was translating into English Koestler's anti-Communist manuscript that he was writing in German. In the chaos following the declaration of war and the subsequent harassment and internment of Koestler by the French, she managed to save a copy of the translation and smuggle it to England in 1940, where in the following year it was published under the title ''

Darkness at Noon ''Darkness at Noon'' (german: link=no, Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried f ...

''. The title for the book was her idea.A & C Koestler: '' Stranger on the Square'' p. 25 During the war she worked for the Ministry of Information and after her release she began to establish her artistic reputation with a number of solo exhibitions and also with exhibits at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. In 1947 she married the graphic designer

Henri Kay Henrion Frederick Henri Kay Henrion, RDI, OBE ( Heinrich Fritz Kohn; 1914–1990), was a Nuremberg-born German graphic designer. Early career After leaving school, Henrion went to Paris, and worked in textile design before studying with poster designer ...

but left him in the 1970s. They had two sons and a daughter. From 1980 she was a member of the

. Her bust of Arthur Koestler was shown at the Royal Academy in 1984. Bronze casts of the bust were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and the Koestler Foundation. She kept on working until failing

eyesight Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflect ...

in her eighties stopped her sculpting.

External links

�
Obituary in ''The Guardian''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hardy Henrion, Daphne People from Amersham 1917 births 2003 deaths Arthur Koestler 20th-century British sculptors Alumni of the Royal Academy Schools