A recent monograph on Irma Stern described the period between 1948 and 1966 as that of her ‘late style’. Despite her age, throughout this time she was ‘tirelessly travelling and enthusiastically working until the very end.’ One of her destinations in these years was Madeira, the small Portuguese island territory off the north-west coast of Africa. She had visited the island decades before in 1931 when she spent three months there and produced a large number of portraits and streetscapes. Some of her drawings from that visit show an interest in Madeiran street life which she later resumed on subsequent visits, with one specific drawing showing figures by a doorway (fig. 1).

Summer Morning in Madeira is rendered in effulgent, saturated hues. Madeira is a rocky island, with its main conurbations like Funchal being arranged on terrain which slopes down towards the Atlantic Ocean. Stern’s painting depicts a street scene with a rough dirt road dropping down across the picture from right to left. A building fills the painting, its colour exaggerated and distorted to suggest the reflected brightness and warmth of sunlight. Following her training under Ludwig Kirchner in Germany in the 1920s, Stern developed an Expressionist approach to colour, using it not to describe her subject but to evince a forceful visual and emotional effect. The contrasts of yellow, turquoise and red in Summer Morning in Madeira at once evoke the scene and serve Stern’s personal artistic purposes. The handling of the sloping ground is exemplary of this, being a welter of wet-on-wet colourism: strokes of pink, blue, red, yellow and green are interwoven freely and with fluid self-assurance.

In the 1950s, Stern enjoyed a new level of acclaim at home in South Africa. Her work was selected for the South African pavilion at four consecutive Venice Biennales between 1950 and 1958 – an accolade which suggests her apotheosis as the country’s national artist.

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The provenance of this work is Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London. The work was deaccessioned in 2018 as part of a wide ranging reassessment of its Collection and Collecting policies which addressed the modus operandi of this physically small scale institution resulting in their Sustainability and Public Benefit Strategy. Their revised, enlightened, strategic plan and core public benefit objectives drove their transformation into the first full scale virtual museum and research centre in 2019. Many works have been transferred free of charge to other museum collections and the funds raised from sales are being reinvested for the benefit of the charity in general funding new acquisitions and enhancing the museum’s research unit studying, and digitally recording, the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.