Painted just before the Artist’s seminal turn to pure abstraction, View on the Cam from Magdalene Bridge, Cambridge, no.2 reveals Victor Pasmore’s early talent and enduring fascination with painting. The serene, romantic atmosphere and the depiction of hazy morning mist settling upon the river is indicative of Pasmore’s early and sophisticated influences from across art history: from the Old Masters to Impressionism and to the British 19th century painters and watercolourists, perhaps most importantly, the late landscapes JMW Turner.

Pasmore shared this educated and overarching view of painting with his contemporaries working in early 20th century London: in 1934 he was elected a member of the London Artist’s Association, who were considered the great modern painters of the moment. Pasmore combined tradition with modernity with grace and sincerity across his work, and in View on the Cam, there is a freedom of colour and a form, combined with an unapologetic take on modernism to paint the what the Artist sees and feels in front of him. Pasmore expressed that, “I do not paint directly from nature, I endeavour to paint in reaction to natural forms.”

During the critical post war years, water was an important part of Pasmore’s evolution in painting. In 1942, Pasmore and his wife moved to a house overlooking the Thames in Chiswick, before moving to Hammersmith and then Blackheath - the latter two places still having a proximity to the water. Some notable works include The Thames at Chiswick and Chiswick Reach, and the present work, made a few years after these two paintings, shows an even more developed palette and understanding of light, form and colour in landscape. Landscape was an enduring subject in Pasmore’s early work, as for example, some of his earliest known pictures depict the traditionally English landscapes of Surrey, where the artist grew up during the war.

View on the Cam from Magdalene Bridge, Cambridge, no.2 is one of Pasmore’s last representational works of art. Just three years after the present work was painted, it became clear to Pasmore that pictorial representation was no longer his direction in art and he shortly embraced abstraction - primarily the result of a renewed encounter with the modernist pioneer, Ben Nicholson. In 1950, he was commissioned to make a mural, where he discovered that the painting worked better in low relief than as a flat surface, and he experimented with creating illusionistic space using relief as opposed to just paint. This commission opened a world of new creative possibilities for the Artist, and he never looked back to painterly representation. However, View on the Cam from Magdalene Bridge, Cambridge, no.2 is influential in demonstrating firstly Pasmore’s talent in painting, and secondly, how important his early education and relationship to representation was, before he made the lifelong commitment to abstraction for then onwards.