Dating from a crucial moment in Frost's early career, Brown and Yellow is an exceptionally large painting from this period and reveals the importance of recent French painting for the artist, with echoes of de Stael and Poliakoff in its heavy impasto and structuring of colour areas. Painted just after Frost had been awarded a Gregory Fellowship to teach painting at Leeds University, it reveals the impact of the artist's move to Leeds and the inspiration he received from the landscape of Yorkshire. What Frost learnt there was combined with his pre-existing concerns derived from his time in St Ives. Indeed during this period Frost would summer in St. Ives and spend the rest of the year in Yorkshire.

As in Blue and Red that shortly preceded it, Brown and Yellow contains forms that are closely related to those to be found in Frost's Walk Along the Quay series of paintings and the composition is particularly close to a linocut of this subject. Indeed, although inscribed on the reverse Brown and Yellow, Frost later amended the title to Brown and Yellow (Harbour), making explicit that St. Ives still remained a source for this painting. Allusions to the Cornish coast and to fishing vessels, especially in the upper centre of the composition, combine with enclosed areas that suggest the fields of Yorkshire and the introduction of swirling forms that Frost suggested were inspired by sheep's tales. Nonetheless, despite such stimuli in the coast and landscape of England, the result is a painting in which the abstraction of these elements allowed Frost to be championed as one of the leading young abstract painters in Britain.