Prunella Clough (1919-1999)

This painting was exhibited in 1948 with two others as Clough’s contribution to a group show at Roland, Browse & Delbanco in Cork Street. Clough’s biographer Frances Spalding has analysed the painting thus: ‘the dominant concern behind Still Life with Yellow Marrows, as the block-crayon study for this composition reveals, was not such details as the broken weave of the basket or the shapes of the marrows but instead the dense flow of light and shadow. In the final painting, the yellow marrows, slightly acidic in colouring, glow gently amid the penumbra within and around the loose woven basket, the dim light creating faint divisions in the shadows on the table and in the background. All is very quiet, grave, intense, low-key, Chardinesque….’ Clough’s main aim was to present the familiar as if it were unknown and strange, worthy of attention. She certainly succeeds here.

A.L.