Dalla Husband

Gladys Dalla Husband (March 3, 1899 – August 15, 1943) was a Canadian artist who was active in Paris and Mexico.

Early life The daughter of Major Herbert Husband, she was born in Winnipeg and grew up on the family ranch in Vernon. The family moved to England in 1903 but returned to Canada in 1907, settling in Banff. She studied art with British ex-pat artist Jessie Topham Brown, who was based in British Columbia.

Career After she received an inheritance from her grandmother, she traveled to London and then Paris where she pursued further studies in art. She exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants there in 1929. Her work was also shown at galleries in Paris, London and in Canada.

She worked with Hayter on two projects: Solidarité, published in 1936, and Fraternité, published in 1939 by Gonzalo More, Paris. Other artists participating in these projects included Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. Funds raised by these projects supported the Spanish resistance and Spanish orphans and widows.

Husband returned to Canada at the start of World War II.

Mexico In May 1940, she left for Mexico where a group of Canadian and other artists were working. She died in Mexico City at the age of 44, of blood poisoning after undergoing ear surgery. Her Mexican death certificate dated August 16, 1943 states that Dalla Husband, listed as a painter, died from postoperative cardiac failure ("Insuficiencia Cardiaca Postoperativia") at the Cowdray Hospital, the American British Cowdray Medical Centre. According to the certificate, she is buried in Mexico City at the Panteón Jardín along with many distinguished figures from Mexican music, art and cinema.

Collections Two of her etchings along with Trevelyan's gallery brochure, The Circulating Library of Pictures, containing her name as a contributor, are found in Trevelyan's scrapbook, datable 1938-1940, in the Tate Museum archives.

The Langston Hughes papers in the collection of Yale University Archives contains a short letter to Hughes from Husband in reference to the engravings she made for his poem Madrid. This undated letter was sent to Hughes from an address in the historic centre of Mexico City and includes one engraving.

In 1989, the Winnipeg Art Gallery acquired a substantial collection of Husband's art: significant oil paintings (Machinist; Dream Landscape; Bird; Man, Horse and Cart) and several etchings.