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He returned to England with his first wife, Mary Jervis Read at the outbreak of war. Their daughter, Sylvia, was born in 1940. Throughout the war, Mann served as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery but was never appointed an official war artist.
In an art career that spanned nearly half a century, the effects of light and shadow, remained a life-long fascination.
In his earliest work done in Paris and London before and just after the war, the artist paints facing the sun. These small-scale works of urban scenes tend to be mono-chromatic and done from preliminary sketches.
For three years, from the early to mid-1950’s, the artist paints in artificial light, focusing on the three-dimensional shape of shadows, cast by household objects on surfaces. This development, known as the “solid-shadow period”, was important to Mann’s artistic development, as he uses strong, intense colouring with a formalised line for the first time.
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