Prunella Clough

Manhole III

Artist's Resale Right

Lot Closed

November 23, 04:11 PM GMT

Estimate

40,000 - 60,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Property from an Important Private Collection

Prunella Clough

1919 - 1999

Manhole III

signed Prunella Clough, dated 1953 and titled (on the stretcher bar); also signed Prunella Clough, dated 1953 and titled (on label affixed to the frame)

oil on canvas

unframed: 80.5 by 59.5cm.; 31¾ by 23½in.

framed: 99.5 by 78cm.; 39¼ by 30¾in.

Executed in 1953.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Visions and Recollections: Prunella Clough and Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press, 2014), for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

Alan Freer, Esq
The Hart Gallery, London and Linby, where acquired by the present owner, 13th February 1998

Having painted Lowestoft fishermen for some time and made use of their netting and tackle as pictorial ingredients, Clough then turned her attention inland, towards the builders and labourers, lorry drivers and construction workers of the inner city. The theme, emblematic of the optimism and regenerative forces operating in post-war Britain at the time, provided her with a readymade contemporary subject and one that, hitherto, had largely remained unexplored.

Her interest in workmen, who are habitually represented as generic types, rather than individuals, lies in their relationship to their colourless working environment and the accoutrements and tools of their trade.

Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Clough imposed formal structures on her subjects and figures, fixing them within the confines of the composition. Her restricted palette of dirty creams, burnt orange and umbers of her Manhole series of oil paintings, unifies their compositional elements and evokes the atmospheric grime of the labourer’s world.

Gerard Hastings