Pick of the week

When Victoria Crowe (b. 1945) paints a snowy hillside, she does not give us only the transient surface; the textures of what lies beneath, ribs of rock, plough, bent grass and whins, can be read as if unveiled. She is also a painter of winter twilight, as relished by a great admirer of her work, Peter Davidson, whose 2015 book The Last of the Light showed him to be a connoisseur of melancholy.

I, too, have long admired her work, so it was a pleasure to meet her at a preview for her show at Flowers, 21, Cork Street, W1 (until May 21). Serendipitously, I was due to say a couple of words about her in Edinburgh the following week. There are only about a dozen works in the show, titled ‘Resonance of Time’. This allows one to savour their full emotional charge, similar to the best of Atkinson Grimshaw or Millais’s Autumn Leaves. Miss Crowe stands in that tradition of gentle melancholia, but she makes it her own. As she has said: ‘For me it is a positive honouring of past events and memory— melancholy is underrated.’ Prices from £4,800 to £42,000.