A fleeting exhibition of the work of Suzanne Cooper (1916-92) has just opened at the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden (the exhibition was this last weekend and will also be on display next weekend, but can be seen midweek by telephoning the gallery). Royal Albion was painted in 1936 when Suzanne Cooper was twenty. ‘In 1948 this painting was given to the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, by the influential patron and collector Lucy Carringon Wertheim. It hangs there alongside works by Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis – artists with whose work Cooper’s has much in common. This depiction of the Royal Albion hotel shows a familiar English seaside view. Painted during her time at the Grosvenor School of Art, the artist incorporates the simplified blocks of form and colour popular with other modernist painters in the 1920s and 30s.’
19 March 2018
