A Painting Called “Sweet Summer”

As many of my readers may know already, I used to run an art gallery and I like the company of artists. In the late 1980s an artist and friend of mine, Endre Roder, created a powerfully evocative oil painting he called “Sweet Summer”, which is reproduced above. The actual colours are much deeper and stronger than I have been able to reproduce. I subsequently purchased the painting and have kept it ever since. 

I ran an art gallery in the Lancashire town, Bolton, for nine years in the 1970s but I only met Endy after my gallery had closed. I saw straight away that his art has a kind of sublime beauty, depth and quality. It nearly always centres on the female form within an imaginary, almost a fantasy, landscape. Indeed the female, or females, who populate his paintings are themselves imbued with a kind of mythic sensuality. In the words of John Basford, who subsequently write a biography of Endre Roder, his paintings have a quality that “articulates the myth of the innocent wanderer, typified in myth by Acteon, who intrudes upon the goddess, Artemis, to his ultimate cost.

The painting actually takes its name, Sweet Summer, from the title and theme of my first published novel of the same name. The name of the virginal young goddess in the foreground of the painting is Angela Hawksworth, and her murder triggers the subsequent drama in the novel.