Brightness falls

The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick houses was St Paul’s, rising triumphantly through the haze. Mann, who grew up in Nottingham and trained at the Royal Academy in the 1930s, had painted the bombsites around Spitalfields and the streets of postwar London when he finally turned his hand in 1961 to the view from his Finsbury tenement block.

The resulting painting was exceptional. He captured the cathedral in the distance with such a swift brush that it seems almost to dance on the horizon. The optimism Mann clearly found in the city skyline reflected his own change in circumstances as much as those of Britain. Financially unstable, he had spent much of the previous decade cooped up in an apartment over a bullion shop with barred windows and no natural light. His so-called ‘solid shadow paintings’ — graphic, hard-edged still lifes which foreshadow both Patrick Caulfield’s work and the rise of digital — were produced under harsh electric lighting.