Daisy Dunn

Brightness falls

Mann’s glowing views-from-a-window, which are on show now at Woking’s Lightbox gallery, reveal a painter that we should know better

issue 09 February 2019

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.

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