Still Life in a Workshop by Prunella Clough, b.1919

Prunella Clough, b.1919
Scroll down for information.
Click here to return to the list.

Still Life in a Workshop

Original lithograph with textural rubbing printed in colours. 1949. Signed in pencil. Edition of a few proofs only. Printed by the artist herself on her studio press. Extremely rare.

Superb hand-printed proof impression. On cream medium-stiff wove paper. Excellent original unrestored condition; two traces of old tape on the verso. Full margins as printed.
Sheet: 14 3/4 x 11 3/8ins. Image: 11 3/4 x 10 1/8ins (297x258mm)

This item is sold.
Click here to enquire about this item.

Prunella Clough was without doubt one of the most gifted, but least hyped, British abstract painters of the 20th century. She had the ability to combine abstract concepts and a lyrical painterly handling of the brush in a way that that had the consummate ease of the truly great artist. She was interested in printmaking from her very earliest period, not in the sense of making editions for many of her finest prints exist only in a tiny number of examples, but in the sense of using the techniques of print to create a special type of imagery. Her very finest prints of the period at the end of the 40's and in the early 50's are amongst the finest (and rarest) British graphic works of the mid 20th century.

Prunella Clough was studying at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1930's, taught by Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan and on occasion Sutherland. Under their influence she worked first in a romantic vein, but during the War she drew charts and maps and contact with an industrial environment led her work into a much more urban down-to-earth imagery. When she had her first show at the Redfern in 1947 it was this 'earthiness' as well as her tremendously inventive approach to the creation of an abstract arrangement of forms which caught the critics attention.

It was also in the late 1940's that she was making her first prints. 'Still Life in a Workshop' is an outstanding example of the extraordinary creativity of these works which are in the forefront of British art of the period. Only a very few proofs were ever printed of the such works, and they are of extreme rarity nowadays.