Cyril Mann

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Cyril Mann (28 May 1911 – 7 January 1980) was a British painter and sculptor who explored light and shadow in new ways. He also created sculptures, including a family crest for a manor.

He was born in London and grew up mostly in Nottingham. At 14 he won a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art, becoming the youngest boy there. Two years later he moved to Canada hoping to become a missionary, but he later gave up religion and worked in mining, logging, and printing in British Columbia. The beauty of the landscape inspired him to paint again. In Vancouver he met Arthur Lismer, a Canadian Group of Seven painter, who advised him to return to England to study art. Mann went back to London in 1933, painted in Maida Vale, and with help from Rev. Oliver Fielding Clark he studied at the Royal Academy starting in 1935. He also studied in Paris, supported by patron Erica Marx. He returned to England with his first wife, Mary Jervis Read; their daughter Sylvia was born in 1940.

During World War II Mann served as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery, but he was not made an official war artist. From 1956 to 1964 he lived at Bevin Court in Islington, London, where a wall plaque later commemorated him in 2013.

Mann’s art focused on light and shadow. In his early Paris and London work he painted facing the sun, creating small, monochrome urban scenes from quick sketches. In the early 1950s he experimented with artificial light, exploring the three‑dimensional shapes of shadows, a period known as the “solid-shadow” phase. This phase used strong colors and clear lines for the first time.

From the 1960s his work often depicted dynamic light, usually inspired by nude photographs of his second wife, Renske van Slooten, who was much younger than him. He also painted sunlit interiors, flowers, self-portraits, and everyday objects such as an oil can, a stapler, and items from his family life. He painted quickly, often on large canvases, giving his later work a sense of freedom and immediacy. In this period he also painted his wife and their daughter Amanda, who was born in 1968.

His final self‑portrait, titled Ecce Homo or Behold the Mann, shows him posing nude between two earlier self‑portraits. Cyril Mann died on 7 January 1980, at age 68, after years of mental illness and heart disease.