This rare watercolour from 1942 typifies her work of the early 1940s which show her at her closest to Neo-Romanticism, the context in which she initially established her reputation. A key subject was the coast, notably the sea-shore, fishing fleets and land at Lowestoft and Yarmouth.

Writing of this period, Malcolm York, has referred to affinities with Paul Nash, John Tunnard and Edward Wadsworth and the way these combined with the Neo-Romanticism of Ayrton, Minton, Colquhoun and Vaughan.

Not long after the present work, Clough wrote a rare statement about her intentions:

painting is an exploration of an unknown country, or as Manet said, it is like throwing oneself into the sea to learn to swim.

Anything that the eye or the mind's eye sees with intensity and excitement will do for a start; a gasometre is as good as a garden, probably better; one paints what one knows.

To record this experience the original experience must be reconstructed; it gropes as a crystal or a tree grows, with its own logic. Drawings work out the idea in many ways, slowly feeling towards clarity and order; stone or wood, oil paint or watercolour, these have the last word.

Whatever the theme, it is the nature and structure of an object - that and seeing it as if it were strange and unfamiliar, which is my chief concern.

Prunella Clough, Picture Post, 12 March 1949, vol. 42, no. 11