Still Life with Yellow Marrows

Details

Prunella Clough (1919-1999)
Still Life with Yellow Marrows
signed 'Clough' (lower right)
oil on canvas
16 x 21 in. (41 x 53.5 cm.)
Painted in 1948.
To be sold with a block-crayon drawing of the same subject, by the same hand.

Provenance

with Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London.
Constance Cummings and Ben Levy.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 9 June 1989, lot 367.
with New Art Centre, London, where purchased by the present owner in January 1991.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, The Modern Show: British Art from Private Collections 1908-1958, Leeds, Harewood House, 2006, p. 16, exhibition not numbered, illustrated.
F. Spalding, Prunella Clough: regions unmapped, Farnham, 2012, p. 82, pl. 42.

Exhibited

London, Olympia, Prunella Clough: Seeing the World Sideways, March 2004, no. 86.
Leeds, Harewood House, The Modern Show: British Art from Private Collections 1908-1958, March - June 2006, exhibition not numbered.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Brought to you by

Philip Harley

pharley@christies.com +44 207 389 2687

Lot Essay

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.

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