Clara Klinghoffer

Clara Esther Klinghoffer (18 May 1900 – 18 November 1970) was a British painter and draughtswoman. Born in Austria-Hungary to a Polish-Jewish family and raised in England, she won early acclaim as a student, when critics likened her drawing to that of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. She worked chiefly as a portraitist and figure painter, and her sitters included Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Klinghoffer exhibited widely in London and, later, in the United States, where she settled and declined to adopt abstract expressionism. Her work is held by public collections including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Ben Uri gallery. Her father moved to England to work as a tailor in Manchester, and Clara followed with her mother in 1903; the family settled in London's East End in 1904.

She drew from an early age and took classes at the John Cass Institute in Aldgate in 1914 before entering the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied under Duncan Grant and Bernard Meninsky from 1915 to 1918. Meninsky's declaration that "that child draws like da Vinci" helped establish her early reputation. The couple had a daughter, Sonia, and moved to the Netherlands in 1929, where a son, Michael, was born; Klinghoffer lived in the Netherlands and France from 1930 to 1939.

In 1939, with the German invasion of the Netherlands imminent, the family returned briefly to London before emigrating to the United States. Furniture and works left in storage in a Haarlem warehouse were later seized by the occupying German forces.

Critical reception Klinghoffer's student work brought early acclaim, and reviewers repeatedly compared her drawing to that of the Old Masters; the Daily Graphic headlined one notice "Girl Who Draws Like Raphael". Epstein called her "a painter of the first order" whose understanding of form placed her "in the very first rank of draughtsmen in the world",

After she settled in the United States, Klinghoffer's prominence declined as taste shifted toward abstraction.

Death Klinghoffer died in London on 18 November 1970, aged 70.