An exhibition of the work of Prunella Clough runs at Tate Britain until 27 August; it then transfers to Norwich and Kendal. Clough was born in 1919, had her first one-woman show in 1947, and in 1999, the year of her death, she won the Jerwood Painting Prize. The progress of her long creative life can be followed chronologically in a sequence of three modest rooms at the Tate.

By choice she exhibited little and, although well enough off not to need to, taught for much of her life. The designer Eileen Gray was her aunt; Clough was trustee of Gray's estate and, as Bryan Robertson records in his obituary, she 'licensed reproductions of furniture, and passed on all the annual royalties to art schools, as bursaries or as equipment, or to impoverished students and hard-up fellow artists'. A combination of modesty, broadly socialist sympathies and creative as well as financial independence goes some way towards explaining her subject-matter and also, perhaps, why she never felt the need to settle on a single identifiable style.

LRB 2 August 2007 | PDF Download