Although he trained as an actor, Rolf Brandt enjoyed drawing and making collages. In his native Germany he developed an interest in Dada and Surrealism and in Bauhaus artists such as Paul Klee. He moved to London from Hamburg in the early 1930s with his brother Bill (1904–83), who became famous as a photographer.
This drawing was made for a short story written by Brandt himself. It reflects the Surrealist quality of Brandt’s imagination, whereby even a shop on a quiet country road takes on an eerie quality. Disembodied hands point to the resemblance between a child-like but ghostly face in the shop window and an equally ghostly face on a map.
