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, Buckinghamshire, to Major Clive Hardy, a diplomat, and his wife Judith. Between 1923 and 1931 she was educated in

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital o ...

, 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 The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpo ...

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 ...

''. 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 Exhibition The Summer Exhibition is an open art exhibition held annually by the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly in central London, England, during the months of June, July, and August. The exhibition includes paintings, prints, drawings, s ...

s. In 1947 she married the graphic designer Henri Kay Henrion but left him in the 1970s. They had two sons and a daughter. From 1980 she was a member of the

. Her

bust Bust commonly refers to: * A woman's breasts * Bust (sculpture), of head and shoulders * An arrest Bust may also refer to: Places * Bust, Bas-Rhin, a city in France *Lashkargah, Afghanistan, known as Bust historically Media * ''Bust'' (magazin ...

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