Study for "The Sink"

This study was painted in the kitchen of Red Studio, Mary Potter's house in the grounds of the Red House in the hinterland of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, the home of her friends Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. With her husband, the writer Stephen Potter, she had previously lived at the Red House. They divorced in 1955 and she moved in 1957 to Crag House on the seafront, swapping it with Britten and Pears, who relocated to the Red House to find more space and seclusion for Britten to compose. In 1963, Potter moved back to Red Studio, which had been designed for her by the architect Peter Collymore. 

This sketchbook drawing relates to a watercolour study sold at Gorringe's on 2 September 2024 (lot.. 1738), and a painting in oils with wax and turpentine medium shown at the retrospective exhibition, 'Mary Potter Paintings 1922-1980' (Serpentine Gallery, 23 May - 28 June 1981, catalogue no. 72, collection John Trew). In all three works, it is the reflection of the taps in the half-full sink and the consequent tonal pattern that is the true subject of the work. At this late stage in her life, much of Potter's work was concerned with her immediate surroundings, including the kitchen sink. 

In a Sunday Times review of the critically acclaimed Sepentine retrospective, Marina Vaizey wrote, "The results over the past several decades have been paintings of the most exquisite tensile webs of pale resonant colour, the subjects almost vanished, but the echoes imaginatively suggesting the fullness of life: an evanescent evocation of the shapes and surroundings in which people live. The very delicacy is paradoxically full-blooded".