Here is

Paule Vézelay with some of her paintings in her studio in St John's Wood in London in 1934: the painting on the wall behind her is in particular her future textile designs writ large.

Composure was originally designed in 1937 and then after the war it was used by the newly founded Ascher as a printed rayon dress fabric (in several colour ways). Paule Vézelay 'was one of the first female British artists, working alongside leading textile designers of the day, to produce modern abstract designs for fabrics which helped to raise the standards of mass-production in the printed textile industry in post-war Britain.'

This is a 1947 printed silk head square designed for Ascher. It is the kind of thing one can imagine the Queen wearing in 1947-8, or Cressida in A House in the Country (which is reprinting so it really shouldn't be mentioned) or even the appallingly fascinating Deborah in To Bed with Grand Music.

On the Post this week: Paule Vézelay (1892-1984) who was one of the first British artists  to experiment with abstraction. Her textile design work began in the late 1930s and continued for twenty years. It was celebrated in a recent article in The Decorative Arts Society Journal. This is Crescents 1955, produced for Heal's in five colourways; it was  one of her most popular and enduring designs.

Welcome if there are new visitors to the Post because of the Bloomberg video here: 32k viewers so far on Friday morning UK time and maybe some of them have then arrived on this page. It's hard to explain what the Post does or is 'for' but regular readers 'get it' so maybe it's a slow build. Anyway, this week has been about Alfred Wallis, the 1930s primitive painter of ships and sea. Here, finally, are some of the paintings in situ at Kettle's Yard.

The Financial Times, reviewing the Wallis exhibition in Cambridge, said that he was a talisman for modernism in the 1930s and is suddenly an artist for this moment too – because his paintings offer 'the texture and sounds of the sea to confined landlocked audiences.' This is a bit far fetched! Though charming. But you could just as well say that the French Impressionists are the artists for the moment because they give us a glimpse of what we are denied. Nevertheless, Wallis is as appealing as ever and lockdown or no lockdown his work brings pleasure to us all.

Jim Ede called Wallis the primitive of the 20th century', authentically 'naive without being sophisticated'. That is such an interesting concept - naive and unsophisticated. The opposite in fiction would presumably be The Young Visiters, which is naive but very sophisticated (even for a nine-year-old). Most of the Wallis paintings are undated and don't have titles, although Jim Ede gave titles to many of them.