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.

This work, dating from 1948, is an early demonstration of Goodwin’s concern with the daily lives of the working class, and how it has been made uncertain by the devastation of the war. Here, a man is hunched over reading what seems to be a newspaper, with pages folded on his lap. The colour palette is vibrant with saturated cobalt blue, brick red and aquamarine. The detail of the bare trees in the window add to the slight melancholy of this intimate composition.