Signed and dated l.r.: C.Rogers/1948

Oil on canvas, 58 by 61.5 cm (22 ¾ by 24 ins)

Provenance: the artist’s family

Exhibited: London Group, 1948

Alongside William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore, Rogers was the driving force behind the Euston Road School, which was launched inn 1937. The school’s aims were motivated by a self-conscious move away from abstraction towards figurative art (a “new realism” as they described it) – a move partly  driven by an aim to make contemporary art more accessible to the wider public. Rogers’s work was rarely overtly political, but nevertheless featured in the Whitechapel show Unity for Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development in 1939. His colleagues William Coldstream and Graham Bell were both AIA members and the movement and its influence held great sway in the febrile artistic world of the mid-century. This view is taken from the artist’s painting room in Bloomsbury looking onto Taverton Street below. A near identical version of this composition, but under snow, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (acc.WA1948.71).