Mary Potter 1900-1981
Steamer in the Rain, 1948
oil on canvas
15½ x 12½ ins




This atmospheric and highly poetic little picture was painted (according to information from the artist’s family) in April 1948 when the family, then living in Harley Street, London, took a short holiday in Swanage. Views of water - seas, lakes or rivers and - views through windows, between them, provide constantly recurring motifs in Mary Potter’s work and in containing both elements Steamer in the Rain is in many ways a highly characteristic example of her work. Given however that by far the greater quantity of her paintings were completed over the last 30 years of her life after she had gone to live in Aldeburgh, this picture nonetheless represents a comparatively early example of the mature style by which she was to achieve so much critical acclaim in the 60s and 70s, culminating in a major retrospective exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in the year of her death in 1981.

The delicate, understated colour and almost abstract brushmarks that marked her mature style are already very evident here. It was a style which owed its origins to the example of Whistler, Gwen John and possibly even Victor Pasmore, whose pale, lyrical evocations of the Thames of the early 40s had been painted from a studio close to where Mary Potter had lived on Chiswick Mall in the 30s.

To all of these however Mary Potter added her own quite distinctive feeling, resulting in an art which the curator David Brown has aptly characterised as being 'one of suggestion rather than description. It is quiet and unemphatic but never sweet or sentimental and has a lasting resonance'.