This rare painting depicts night street scene in Piccadilly Circus in London executed in 1957 by British-Czech female painter and graphic artist of Jewish origin Kathe Strenitz (born Fischel). She was born in Gablonz, Bohemia on 12 April 1923 and  was one of the so-called ‘Winton children’, who travelled on a Quaker-sponsored kindertransport to England in 1939, aged 16. Following difficult experiences as a refugee including insufficient food, she arrived in London to find that Mrs Winton had sent some of her drawings to Austrian emigre artist Oskar Kokoschka, upon whose recommendation she was awarded a British Council scholarship at Regent Street Polytechnic. Dissatisfied with the teaching however, she left and did full-time war work, moving into the Czech Trust Fund-maintained Canterbury Hall hostel, where she met refugee poet Erich Fried and her future husband, a Czech-Jewish journalist-turned-entrepreneur. They had a daughter in 1950, after which she completed her art education. By then her husband owned a plastics factory north of Kings Cross whose interior – as well as the surrounding industrial landscape – became the subject of many of her engravings. She received the Lord Mayor’s Award for woodcuts, exhibited regularly at the Bankside gallery, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, and her work is in a number of museum collections. Käthe Strenitz died in London.

Literature: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum of Jewish refugee and emigrants in England  since 1900.

Inscription: signed  and dated  K.Strenitz 1957  lower right.

Technique: gouache on paper, laid down on cardboard. Gallery frame.

Measurements: w 21" x h 14 3/4" (53 x 37,5 cm), framed w 30 3/4 " x h 24 2/3" (78 x 62,5 cm)

Condition: in very good condition