Maud Frances Eyston Sumner (South African, 1902-1985) Still Life
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Notes : Throughout her career Maud Sumner frequently painted still lifes. To the artist the flowers and the fruit which she would often also include in these compositions as she does here, represented the freeness of nature in what she saw to be otherwise stifling interiors. For most of her career, Sumner worked away from her South African contemporaries in England and France. Her studies in Oxford, and more significantly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, played a definite role in shaping her art. Most notably she was connected to Les Nabis painters Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) through her tutor Maurice Denis (1870-1943), a figure who was critical in her artistic development.For Sumner oil painting was a means to depict the vitality and richness of colour and texture. The present lot is a superb example of this with its intense blocks of colour and vivid brushstrokes which work together to create a feeling of static movement. The angular coloured shapes which make up the background of the present lot, influenced partly by later Nabis painting, which was in turn influenced by Cézanne, are a current feature in works produced by Sumner after the Second World War. It was also around this time that the artist began to exploit the use of colour as her guiding principle; painting with a greater range and brightness of colour, as can be seen here. It is therefore likely that this work was produced in the early 1950s.BIBLIOGRAPHY:C. Eglington, Maud Sumner, (Cape Town, 1967)
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