This is Old fashioned Pottery Transferring the Pattern onto the Biscuit. Hester Reeve wrote in Apollo magazine: ‘ From an early age Sylvia Pankhurst had admired the work of William Morris and Walter Crane and hoped to one day ‘decorate halls where people would foregather in the movement to win the new world’. Initially attending the Manchester School of Art (1900–02), where she won the award for best female student, she went on to gain a two-year scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art (1904–06) – with the distinction of having achieved the highest grades of any candidate. Apart from a series of studies made in Venice, it seems that no works survive from this period. Fortunately, a large series of gouaches, watercolours and charcoal works from her ‘Women Workers of England’ tour in 1907 survived. Sylvia Pankhurst took it upon herself to travel the country visually recording the working conditions of women in various industries, going from the Staffordshire potteries to the Glasgow cotton mills. Working on site in often extreme conditions, the images she produced are remarkable for both their beauty and radical critical intention.’

This is An Old-Fashioned Pottery Turning Jasper-ware. Sylvia was horrified to discover that women earned no more than seven shillings a week while being exposed to hazardous flint dust and fumes from lead glazes, and was furious that they were restricted to ‘unskilled’ roles: ‘Each was employed by the man she toiled for – the slave of a slave, I thought!’

This is In a Glasgow Cotton Mill Minding a Pair of Fine Frames. The girl’/woman’s face is much enlarged at the Manchester Art Gallery site here – it’s upsetting that it’s impossible to tell if this is a very weary young girl or a woman of 40.

Who knew that in 1907 Sylvia Pankhurst painted excellent watercolours of women at work? Some of them were recently on display in Scarborough and have now been bought by the Tate. The pictures were published in the London Magazine and Votes for Women. However,  in 1912 Sylvia gave up painting in order to dedicate herself fully to the women’s suffrage cause and the pictures were kept by the family – until now. This is a detail from On a Pot Bank Finishing Off the Edges of the Unbaked Plates on a Whirler.

Poppies by Mary Fedden is available as a Limited Edition print here. If – if – Brexit doesn’t happen, we are going to buy this to hang in the shop as an ecstatic celebration of the future and a way of in some small way making up for the hell of the last two and half years.

A rather wonderful but fairly unknown Vanessa Bell. There are no actual flowers but looking at this is certainly as calming as a cup of tea or a walk  or a good novel. Although, truth to tell, some of us are beginning to wonder if this Brexit agony will ever end, the politicians are immovably stubborn and maybe the only thing to do is ignore them. But this is so hard to achieve. Even this picture was probably painted in France.

At the beginning of this fraught week we said the Post would be devoted to soothing flower paintings. But actually a kipper is just as soothing. And there are some flowers. This is by Mary Potter (1900-81).