At the beginning of her career, at the close of the Second World War, Betty Goodwin was especially concerned with art’s purpose. Like many other artists of her generation, she saw painting as a political and social act that could reconnect the individual to a greater collective purpose. Thus, in the early 1950s, she worked in the Social Realist tradition, depicting the continued struggle of the working class and wartime immigrants.

Dating from 1959, The Candle Sellers is a later example of Goodwin’s concern with the working class strife. It is also at a junction between her earlier Social Realist portraits of workers - such as Untitled (Lot 014 in this sale) – and her later, more abstracted works. Here, Goodwin has practically erased the faces of the two anonymous candle sellers, and has placed them in a nondescript space. By erasing any reference to time, character or place, Goodwin has made this work universal, grounding it in a shared sense of humanism.