Appledore, 1938 by Suzanne Cooper

In the 1930s Suzanne Cooper was a rising artist. While still a student at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, she was showing oil paintings and wood-engravings in prestigious West End galleries. Then came World War II. The Grosvenor School closed. Cooper became a volunteer nurse, and then a wife and mother, and abandoned her artistic ambitions. Forgotten for decades, her work was rediscovered in 2018, with solo exhibitions at the Fry Art Gallery and the Printroom Studio that were greeted as ‘revelatory’. Her work has been compared with that of Christopher Wood and Eric Ravilious.