Mildred Bendall's appeal lies in her use of colour, her imaginative arrangement of objects and her versatile style. A cubist leaning is apparent in her art, in the clarity of her forms and the intellectual ordering of her whole compositions. Some works border on the abstract, but the artist remained on the brink; Bendall was essentially a figurative painter, recording the commonplace but personally important object of her environment.
Her advice to the painter Georges Bernède reveals her clear conception of her chosen artistic vocabulary:
I hope that you will work hard. Think of suggesting space and volume through colour and not simply by adding more or less black and white to your tones, as is the custom at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!was the ethos of a natural colourist.
Sarah Polden
