Property from an Important Private collects ion
Prunella Clough
Manhole III
Lot Closed
November 23, 04:11 PM GTNN
Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from an Important Private collects ion
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 Recollects ions: Prunella Clough and Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press, 2014), for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.
The Hart Gallery, London and Linby, where acquired by the present owner, 13th February 1998
Having painted Lowestoft fishermen for some t.mes 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 t.mes , 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
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