Prunella Clough

The canvas is unlined and is in good overall condition. There is some extremely minor undulation in the corners. The paint surface is in very good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held under glass in a painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Clough's first mature paintings of the men and machinery of Lowestoft harbour in the late 1940s demonstrated a remarkably individual voice in their depiction of everyday hard work. Clough was to develop this theme further in the paintings produced in the London docks in the early 1950s. The Lorry Drivers series has a refreshingly human quality about it, as the figures manage to retain an air of imperturbability in the midst of their grimy industrial surroundings.

Artists such as Clough, Bratby, Middleditch and Greaves favoured subjects showing ordinary men and women at work, whether it be in the kitchen, or further afield in a factory, mine, printing press or on a building site. In this sense a new form of Social Realism developed, as artists painted what they saw happening around them; Britain being rebuilt and re-energised in the tough aftermath of war.

Julian Spalding, in his introduction to The Forgotten Fifties (exhibition catalogue, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1984, p.9) comments that with works such as those from the Lorry Drivers series, artists like Clough 'also share[d] something of the spirit of that rebuilding, their designs provided a strong framework while their brushwork articulated the details. Their canvases make a virtue of work and display commitment and effort...' Indeed, the lorry driver is almost subsumed here within the powerful compositional grid, under the robust delight that Clough takes in all the truck's machined accoutrements.