Doreen Heaton Potworowska 1930-2014

Portrait of Doreen Heaton Potworowska in Sienna, Italy by her husband Peter Potworowski while travelling Europe in 1956

​Doreen Heaton Potworowska was born in 1930 and after leaving school went to study art at the Corsham Academy in Bath. It was while studying at Corsham that she met the Polish artist Peter Potworowski (1889-1962), who had escaped from Poland in 1943 losing all his early work in the German invasion of Poland. He arrived in Britain in 1943 and in 1952 took up a post at Corsham as Professor of Painting. Doreen became Peter’s assistant and they fell in love. From 1954 until 1958 they travelled extensively in Spain and Italy, leading a Bohemian life style that is recorded in her diaries of the period.

In 1958 Peter was invited back to Poland to take up a Professorship teaching art in Poznan and Gdansk. This was meant to be a short term appointment but they decided to stay and it was there that they married shortly before Peter’s death in 1962.
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Doreen stayed in Poland for some years, eventually returning to East Anglia in the mid 1980’s to look after her father. She then produced a large body of work in an abstracted figurative manner. In 1963 Halima Nalecz, the owner of the Drian Gallery in London gave Doreen a one woman show which was a great success. She continued to paint in her own individual style for many years until she was forced by illness to finally give up working.
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A new book on Peter Potworowski is in development and more information on Doreen during the Polish years may well come to light.

​See our paintings for sale by Doreen Heaton Potworowska