Victor Pasmore (1908 - 1998)

Oil on canvas
47.5 x 59.5 cm

Provenance
Redfern Gallery, London
Private Collection, London

This early painting by Victor Pasmore undertaken around 1932 belongs to a group of works featuring scenes of Dieppe from the early 30s. Prior to this new approach, Pasmore’s work concentrated on loosely formed landscapes, often of the countryside where he grew up near Farleigh in Surrey.

Greatly influenced by Turner and Sickert, Pasmore also had a deep appreciation of the French Impressionists. Window at Dieppe, c.1932 marks a departure for Pasmore and is one of his earliest paintings where the figure takes centre stage. In some respects, the work is prosaic - a simple interior where a woman and a man sit opposite each other. The man is smoking a pipe, with the balcony facing the sea. The compositional arrangement hints at Cezanne’s painting ‘The Card Players’, the artist being an undeniable influence on Pasmore during this period. These everyday figurative scenes would occupy his work over the next decade.

In 1933, enjoying some success, Pasmore joined the London Artists’ Association, where he met William Coldstream and Claude Rogers (who were later to form the Euston Road School with Graham Bell). In the same year Pasmore also held his first one-man exhibition at the Cooling Galleries, London and in 1934 exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery, London in the now historic exhibition Objective Abstractions.