The Mystery of KP - Winter on Lake Geneva

Winter on Lake Geneva — How a £8 Book Unlocked a Mystery

I bought it because I liked it. 

That's all. No signature I recognised, no name I could place, no research to justify it. Just a painting. A winter morning on a lake, two figures in the snow, a dog, boats stored for winter, pollarded trees against a grey sky. Something in it stopped me at an auction and I bought it.

The auction description told me almost nothing: Winter park scene. Mid-20th century oil on canvas. Signed with initials KP. 51 x 76cm. Framed.

The monogram was there, lower right. KP. Small, confident, tucked into the corner. But KP told me nothing. But on the stretcher bar, an inscription in careful handwriting: Deborah Dawkin, Geneva, P004.

Three clues. A monogram. A name. A city. And months of searching that went down many rabbit holes.

I searched auction records. I searched artist dictionaries. I searched Geneva art dealers past and present. Deborah Dawkin appeared nowhere in the art world. KP matched dozens of artists across Europe. Geneva narrowed it but not enough.

The painting sat on my wall. I lived with it, liked it more as time passed, and told myself I was willing to spend the rest of my life finding out who painted it.

Then one evening, doing something entirely unrelated on Amazon, a book surfaced in the recommendations. Kathleen Paenson 1924-2002: Paintings and Drawings. Author: Dawkin, Deborah. I stared at it for a long time.

I bought it for £8 from an art book specialist. When it arrived the cover was nothing like the Amazon listing. Inside, on page after page, was the world the painting came from. And then on one page, the painting itself.

'Winter on Lake Geneva', oil on canvas, 51 x 76cm, c.1952.

That was my painting.

Kathleen Paenson was born in Kent in 1924. She studied at Sidcup School of Art under Ruskin Spear and Robin Guthrie, won a scholarship to the Slade, and graduated in 1948  the year an examiner told her: "You will have to choose between being a woman or an artist."

She chose both. It cost her everything and produced work of extraordinary quality.

Sir Kenneth Clark, standing in front of her drawings once said: "I go to Christie's and buy Old Masters, but looking at these, I wonder why I do."

She exhibited at the Royal Academy, the RBA, the AIA and the New English Art Club. She painted murals for the United Nations building in Geneva. She was described by Charles Bradstock of Browse & Darby as "an artist of outstanding talent, gifted with a rare sense of colour and tone."

And then she hid her work under carpets and in drawers, and almost nobody knew.

The Geneva paintings were made during the worst years of her life. Her husband Isaac,  a Russian Jew twenty years her senior, violent and manipulative,  had coerced her into leaving London for Geneva in 1950 when he took a post at the United Nations. She had asked for a divorce. He typed her resignation letters to the schools where she taught and made her sign them.

In Geneva she painted. Portraits, self-portraits, landscapes of the lake and the city. The trees along the lakeside in winter. Figures in the snow. A dog. A bench. The ordinary life of a place she hadn't chosen to be.

Winter on Lake Geneva was painted around 1952, from her window, looking out at the lake. The year she was fighting for custody of her son. The year her marriage was finally ending in the worst possible way. She signed it KP - Kathleen Paenson.

I emailed Deborah Dawkin through via website listed in the book. She replied the same day. She confirmed she is Kathleen's daughter. That P004 is the catalogue number she assigned this painting while documenting her mother's work after her passing in 2002. She told me the painting is a view from Kathleen's window in Geneva, looking out at the lake, the trees that lined the shore in winter. And that it is one of her favourites.

Deborah catalogued her mother's work after Kathleen died in 2002. The year Deborah discovered, to her astonishment, the extent of what she had left behind. Paintings hidden under carpets. Drawings in drawers. Memoirs that began to make sense of a life spent choosing both.

In her diary in 1991, eleven years before she died, Kathleen wrote:

"Should I be asked to redesign my past experiences I would be at a loss, for the beautiful and the marvellous has been so interwoven in my life that it would be impossible to remove the sorrowful and unpleasant without losing the former."

She is talking about Geneva. About the marriage. About the custody battle. About the life that produced these paintings. She would not undo any of it.

I bought the painting because I liked it. What I liked, without knowing it, was a woman looking out of a window on a grey Geneva morning in 1952, finding beauty in the lake and the snow and the boats and the ordinary figures passing below, while her own life was falling apart around her.

That's what painting does. It survives everything. It outlasts the arguments and the custody battles and the decades of hiding under carpets. It ends up in a Sussex auction house, described as a winter park scene with initials KP, and someone stops in front of it, and something in it stops them.

The painting is not for sale. That's not what this is about.

Kathleen Paenson (1924–2002) is listed in Who's Who in Art and David Buckman's Dictionary of British Artists since 1945. Her work is held in public and private collections in Britain, Israel, France, Germany and Switzerland, including the United Nations building in Geneva. There is finally some movement in giving greater recognition to female artists. This story sums why that should take place.

Further information and images: kathleenpaenson.co.uk 

Deborah Dawkin is planning a new exhibition of Kathleen Paenson's work. If you have any information about her works, get in touch via cragbankart.co.uk or via the above website.