Teeming Pit, Baldwin Steel Works, Cardiff

When the Second World War began, Graham Sutherland was thirty-six years old and was therefore aged out of consideration for active duty. In 1940, he held an exhibition of his paintings at the Leicester Galleries in London, and soon afterwards his friend and mentor Kenneth Clark, who had been appointed head of the War Artists Advisory Committee, engaged Sutherland as an official War Artist, a role he fulfilled from 1941 to 1945. He first depicted scenes of bomb damage in London, then turned his attention to studies of industrial production on the home front; tin mining in Cornwall, blast furnaces in South Wales, open cast coal mining and limestone quarrying. Most of his works from this period were acquired by the War Artist’s Advisory Commission and later presented to museums around the country.

At the end of September 1941 Sutherland was sent to make studies of the large blast furnaces at the Guest, Keen and Baldwin Steel Works in Cardiff. The production of steel had taken on a new urgency during the war, since Britain was cut off from foreign imports and urgently needed to produce armaments. The artist was fascinated by the almost alchemical processes in steel manufacturing, and by the huge furnaces and crucibles, the molten steel and the red and yellow glow of the huge flames.

Executed in a rich combination of different media and techniques, this vibrant drawing depicts the process of ‘teeming’ in steel manufacture, namely, the pouring of molten steel into ingot moulds. A very similar composition, drawn in watercolour, wax crayon and black ink and entitled The Smelting Works: Twin Ladles, was presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1947 to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (inv. WA 1947.416.)

Some of Sutherland’s drawings of steelworks were reproduced in one of the small series of books entitled War Pictures by British Artists, published in 1943. In his introduction to the book, Cecil Beaton noted that ‘In those Vulcan forges, our eyes become attuned, unlike the camera lens, to the nuances of darkness amid a strange world that is spasmodically suffused by flashes of green, magenta, puce and golden light. In this world of molten metals, of glowing furnaces, soot and firework sparks, that only the painter can interpret, Graham Sutherland has reverently seized his opportunity to capture this fleeting phenomenon of sequined brilliance, of mystery, of glowing magic.’ (C. Beaton, ‘Introduction’, War Pictures by British Artists. Second Series, No.2: Production, London, 1943, p. 6.)

In later years, Sutherland recalled, ‘I think my war paintings did have a very big effect on me. I was suddenly faced with certain subjects which, as far as painting was concerned, I had had no previous knowledge, and I was, in fact, frightened, simply because I didn’t know how I was going to react. It was a new field entirely and I had to make the best of what I could do, and it undoubtedly had an important effect on me, because clearly nothing one experiences fully is ever wasted. For example, I painted a lot of factory subjects – machinery and the rest – during the war...these vast machines, with violence in the air, later made me see correspondence with the forms in nature. I began to see a curious similarity between machine forms and nature forms. I have always liked and been fascinated by the primitiveness of heavy engineering shops with their vast floors. In a way they are cathedrals. Certainly they are as impressive as most cathedrals I’ve seen and a good deal more impressive than some. And yet the rite – a word I use carefully – being performed when men are making steel, is extraordinary; and how primitive it all really is in spite of our scientific age.’ (the artist quoted in N. Barber, Conversations with Painters, London, 1964, pp.47-48.)