Vintage Pen and Watercolour Village Street Scene in Gilt Frame, Margaret Milne 1988

A village street on a bright day, caught in quick pen lines and washes of ochre, slate and blue. Thatched and slate roofed cottages step up the hill, a red car is parked against a stone wall, and the street is full of life: a woman with a pram, a couple chatting on the corner, a man walking his dog, figures coming down from the cottages above. It has the feel of a Cornish or West Country village on market day, painted by someone who could set down a whole crowd in a few strokes and still make each figure a person.

It is signed and dated 88 in the lower left, and the backboard is inscribed Margaret Milne 1908 to 1998. We attribute it to the listed artist of that name, who was born in Wimbledon in 1908, trained at Regent Street Polytechnic, worked as a book illustrator for Raphael Tuck after the war and went on to exhibit portraits at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon before opening her own gallery in Ditchling, Sussex. If so, this was painted in her eightieth year, and the confidence of the drawing shows a lifetime of practice. The illustrator's eye is everywhere in it, in the way the pen picks out a chimney pot or the set of a shoulder and lets the colour do the rest. 

The watercolour is mounted in a cream card mount within a slim wooden frame with a silvered inner slip, glazed, backed and strung for hanging. The whole measures 37 cm by 35 cm including the frame. The mount has a touch of age toning and the frame a few light marks, all in keeping. It is a lovely size for a landing, a downstairs loo, a study or a kitchen wall, and it sits happily with blue and white china and pale painted furniture. We would hang it low where you can enjoy the figures.

Loose, sunny British street scenes with proper drawing behind them are always the first to go. This one has the added interest of a name and a story, and it is priced well below what the same artist's portraits fetch.