Painter, muralist, draughtsman, illustrator and writer who attended the Slade School of Fine Art, 1918–20. She was confirmed in her desire to be an artist when sitting for a portrait by Ambrose McEvoy. At the Slade the unmarried Daphne Baring, who initially exhibited under this name, met fellow-student Arthur Pollen, also an artist, whom she married in 1926. Like him she studied with Henry Tonks, who encouraged her to undertake wall painting, and Philip Wilson Steer. Her group exhibitions included IS, 1918 (pseudonymously, as B Ginner); “No Name” exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery, 1921; Redfern Gallery, 1923; and NEAC, 1927. She was early encouraged by her uncle, Maurice Baring, illustrating two of his novels, A Triangle, 1923, and Cat’s Cradle, 1925.
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Between 1923–32 Pollen completed a mural for All Hallows, East India Dock Road, but it and the church were destroyed by enemy bombing in 1942 (Pollen consulted Mary Sargant Florence on mural technique, in 1921 executing a fresco at Lambay, County Dublin). The architect Edwin Lutyens asked Pollen to undertake work for a temporary altar at the laying of foundations for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 1933, but domestic ties prevented her doing this. Pollen had been received into the Catholic church in 1925. In 1968, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, exhibited her group portrait of 40 English martyrs, commissioned by General Postulation for the Canonisation of the English Martyrs, presented in St Peter’s, Rome, 1970. In 1976, a monograph by Pollen entitled Mary Rennell, who as Mary Smith had been a fellow-student at the Slade, was published, and Pollen’s privately printed I Remember, I Remember, appeared in 1983. Alan Powers’ 1999 publication Francis Pollen also concerns her. The National Portrait Gallery holds Pollen’s 1932 drawing of the writer Hilaire Belloc; Campion Hall, Oxford an altar back of 1936; and Stonor Park, Buckinghamshire, a group portrait of 40 English Martyrs. She died in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)