Notes

Maud Sumner lived her life between South Africa, England and France. She spent the years of World War II ‘at home’ in South Africa, and when she returned to her studio in Paris in 1947, she noticed that the work of her contemporary artists had undergone a distinct change during her absence. There was a new widespread preoccupation with abstraction and the importance of colour was paramount. Sumner’s work also underwent a significant transformation – the Bonnard and Vuillard influenced intimiste domestic interiors and women in picture hats, so characteristic of her work in the 1930s, were a thing of the past. Sumner’s paintings from the 1950s onwards show a move to far greater abstraction although she never loses touch with representation entirely. The cherry reds and grey blues she favoured in earlier decades remain, but they are used increasingly as sharply defined facets of colour that construct form by means of a network of shapes across the picture plane. River bridges on both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris were a favoured subject over many years as they provided the opportunity for this form of pictorial exploration. In lots 3 and 4, Sumner demonstrates her skill as a master watercolourist with an exceptional economy of means. The white of the paper becomes the reflective shimmer of the water’s surface, and the graceful arches of Battersea Bridge and the bulky forms of tethered barges and industrial buildings on the riverbank, create believable form and receding space using blocks of colour and contrasts of light and shadow.