The Artist's Mother

Cundall was a painter of topographical subjects, townscapes and portraits. After an early career designing pottery and stained glass for Pilkingtons, Cundall was severely wounded in the Great War. However, in 1940 he was elected Official War Artist to the Air Ministry. In between the wars he studied painting in London and Paris, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1917. This cool, unsentimental painting has a balanced composition and a calm geometric background, but the alert pose of the sitter gives liveliness to the picture. The areas of colour are low-key and relatively un-modelled. The building and its plan which appears in a frame to the right of the sitter has not been identified, nor is it known whether there was any significance in Cundall's including it in a portrait of his mother.