Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection.

Beginning her Oxford education in 1922, and later at the Westminster School of Art and Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Maud Sumner spent most of her career in Europe. It was here that her creativity was formatively moulded, influenced by artists such as Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). 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.

The present work is indicative of the paintings she was producing in the early 1930s. Interior Scene encapsulates her preference for closely cropped domestic interiors with a bright palette. As an ever-present element of this era of work, despite the winter exterior, a vase of flowers sits on the desk in a palette that intertwines the sitter with the scene. The intimacy of the scene paired with the intimacy of the composition suggests a close relationship between the artist and the sitter.

Differing from many of Sumner's interior paintings, the present work also incorporates a view of an exterior scene through the two windows that dominate the picture. Exterior and interior scenes were regularly separate subject matters for the artist. Moreover, snow scenes, such as is present in Interior Scene, were completed more regularly in watercolours such as Snow, Wappenbury (1939) and Snow, Eathorpe (1931). This rare fusion of the interior and exterior is a splendid demonstration of Sumner's ability to convey light and perspective. Sumner's holidays, and Christmases in particular, were spent at Eathorpe Park in Warwickshire, where her father had been married and her grandmother and aunts still lived, which was very much her second home until it was sold in the 1950s. Other 1930s studies of Eathorpe under snow can be found in the collections of Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Municipal Art Gallery in The Hague.

Bibliography
C. Eglington, Maud Sumner, (Cape Town, 1967).
F. Harmsen, Maud Sumner: Painter and Poet, (Pretoria, 1992).