Suburban Landscape

As a companion woman painter, Olga Davenport was close to Prunella Clough. Davenport admired Clough greatly and accordingly purchased a keynote work by Clough at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1964. 'In the late 1950s Prunella's work changed rapidly ... Her work appeared to have become more abstract; it was certainly more difficult to decipher as scale became more ambitious and bolder forms replaced tiny, meticulous details. The shift is very evident in the paintings of industrial interiors, in which she transformed fragments of an unidentified factory into still life. Her reinvention of the genre is, arguably, at its most startling in her early 1960s canvases. In Suburban Landscape we can recognise close-up fragments, the spokes of an industrial wheel, the outline of a gate post and the representation of paint on a metal surface.
A Times reporter succinctly sums up the 1964 exhibition where the present work was purchased,'Romantically inspired, still, by industrial, urban and suburban landscape details, Miss Clough sets herself increasingly difficult technical problems which she solves with classical perfection' (see The Times, Fascinating dip into a period including the Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition, 7 October 1964, p. 8).