Dried Sunflowers

An artist whose career mirrors so many of her generation. Pat Algar studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal Academy in the 1960s, a bright and promising student she married soon after graduation and moved to Cornwall never to be heard of again. Her studio sale in a Cornish auction house said as much as any museum retrospective could about the trajectory of her career. Most of the lots were painted in the last forty years of her life and although pleasing in a sub-NEAC decorative way did not begin to hint at the talent displayed by the young art student at the RA Schools. What caught a number of dealers’ eyes were the student works, very resonant of the post war British art scene and perfect examples of that Camberwell School aesthetic that is now so much in fashion. The studio sales flooded the market with her later work, mostly selling for a few hundred here and there and I feel a certain poignancy that she is now remembered for these ordinary little pot boilers rather than the early oils that augured such a dazzling future. Needless to say, this beautiful still life is an early work!