‘Suzanne Cooper grew up in Frinton on the Essex coast.  In 1935, when she was nineteen years old, she became a student at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where she was taught by the master print-makers Iain Macnab and Cyril Power.  Over the next four years she  exhibited her oil-paintings and wood-engravings at the Redfern Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Wertheim Gallery and the Stafford Gallery, and with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Print-Makers (founded by Henry Moore in 1930) and the Society of Women Artists.’ This is Street Scene, it presumably dates from the mid to late 1930s.

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.’

And finally the nineteenth century painter Charles Edward Perugini’s Girl Reading (possibly Kate Dickens). The two were married in 1873, a few weeks after the death of Kate’s first husband Charles Collins. Her life is rather well written up on Spartacus.

Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) Woman Reading

Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichl 1540 which has been at the Uffizi in Florence since 1704.

Henri Michel-Levy (1845-1914) Beach at Courseulles (a French version of the beautiful painting we have on the front of the Classic edition of The Fortnight in September).

A peaceful week of women reading, something far ‘nicer’ and less controversial than last week’s unpleasantly political posts (as some people found them). The Letter by Federico Zandomeneghi  (1841-1917) is in a private collection