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§ Mary Potter, OBE (British, 1900-1981) Scarecrow signed lower right with initials "MP" and inscribed on the reverse with date 1970 on stretcher oil on canvas h:70 w:76 cm Provenance: Believed to have been acquired by the owner directly from the studio of the artist. Other Notes: Mary Potter studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1918, where she won many prizes including the first prize for portrait painting. She shared a studio in Fitzroy Street in London's bohemian Fitzrovia neighbourhood, becoming a member briefly of the Seven and Five Society and exhibiting with The New English Art Club and The London Group. In 1951 Potter moved with her husband to Aldeburgh on the east coast of Suffolk and lived in The Red House, which she swapped, in 1957, for Crag House, owned by Benjamin Britten, with whom she became a close friend after her divorce in 1955. Once her children had grown up, she spent long hours painting. By mixing paint with beeswax, she achieved a "chalky luminous quality" using a "pale and subtle" range of colours, and her work grew increasingly abstract. In his essay for the catalogue of her 1965 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, Mary Potter Paintings 1938–1964, museum director Kenneth Clark said Potter's works "Exist in the domain of seeing and feeling; we know that they are exactly right in the same way that we know a singer to be perfectly in tune"; he described her paintings as "enchanting moments of heightened perception". In the 1960s and 1970s Potter gained increasing recognition. From 1967 she had seven solo shows with the New Art Centre in London. Major retrospective exhibitions of her work were shown at the Tate Gallery in 1980 and the Serpentine Gallery in 1981, which opened to great critical acclaim a few months before her death. In a review of that exhibition in The Sunday Times, 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". The artist produced two versions of 'Scarecrow' - the present painting is the later, more schematic of the two. The earlier 1963 version was exhibited at an exhibition at Whitechapel before being sold in 1989. We are grateful to Mrs Valerie Potter for her assistance with this entry.