
Helene Love-Allotey
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Provenance
A private collection, South Africa.
Symptomatic of her work of the 1930s, the present work by Maud Sumner epitomises her preference of closely cropped domestic interiors with bright palettes for this time. As an ever-present element of this work, a vase of flowers sits on the chest of drawers, perhaps of the sitter's bedroom. The intimacy of the scene paired with the intimacy of the composition suggests a warmth in relationship between artist and sitter.
Spending most of her career in Europe, namely England and France, Sumner was educated at Oxford and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. It was here that her creativity was formatively moulded, whilst also being infuenced by artists such as Les Nabis painters Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) through her tutor Maurice Denis (1870-1943). Continuing to work in naturalist painting throughout the 1930s until the 1940s, Sumner was then exposed to the Rayonist movement, encouraging her own experiments with fragmentation and abstraction after the second world war.
Bibliography
F. Harmsen, Maud Sumner, Painter & Poet, (Pretoria, 1972).
C. Eglington, Maud Sumner, (Cape Town, 1967).