Cara Clough-Taylor was born in Knightsbridge, London on 11 November 1919. She was educated privately by her father, the Board of Trade official and poet Eric Taylor, before enrolling at the Chelsea School of Art in 1937. Her maternal forbears were artistic, but her mother did not encourage her as a painter, perhaps because her mother’s sister the architect and designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was pursuing a Continental career in pioneering modernist architecture and design. This had brought Gray into contact not only with names like Le Corbusier, but also with the lesbian subculture of Paris. The Clough-Taylors were more literary. The only published work by her father traced by the author Margaret Drabble was a letter of January 1912 in The New Age dismissing ‘the dear old bogey of photography destroying painting’. Clough herself submitted poems, unsuccessfully, to editor John Lehmann in 1943, and continued to write poetry all her life. She was sensitive to language, describing and memorising landscapes in words rather than in sketches, before committing herself to paint. Many of these handwritten prose-notes survive. During the Second World War, Clough worked as a cartographer for the US War Office of Information. She resumed painting full-time, supplementing her income with lecturing posts at the Chelsea and Wimbledon Schools of Art and had her first solo exhibition at the Leger Gallery in 1947. Early photographs of Clough hint at the South Kensington drawing rooms she escaped. Later images present a stylish woman, trousered, often smoking a cigarette, sometimes wearing a hat, with thick glasses that betray the eye trouble that plagued her – in later life, she had cataract operations, and despite her wealth, insisted on waiting her turn to have them performed on the National Health Service as she did not want to jump the queue. Her early work was associated with English neo-romanticism but also had affinities with French painting. In the 1950’s her paintings of industrial subjects grew out of her concern to reinterpret figure painting free from its traditional associations. In her later work, figures disappear and landscape becomes her main subject. Concerned with the memory of a scene she was drawn to geometric forms in landscape. Her colours are usually warm and muted, close-toned and strongly textured. Clough produced prints throughout her career, making lithographs on her own press as early as 1948. She experimented with all the print disciplines, continuing to work either on her own, or with most of the well known print studios. Margaret Drabble would write of her: ‘She continued throughout her life to paint the industrial landscape. The first of her paintings purchased by the Tate in 1960 portrays the classic motif of a cooling tower, delicately rendered in tender pinks, yellows and ochres. She also favoured well-worked subjects such as cranes and gasometers, but her later work moved on to describe much less recognisable, more personal material. Broken fences, disconnected bits of machinery, electrical circuits, wastelands, derelict factory yards, building sites, piles of rubble and wiring and dislocations preoccupied her. Her view of industry became decreasingly heroic, more scraggy (her word) and messy. This is the poetry of decline and the rust belt, not a celebration of a prosperous manufacturing nation.’ In 1977 she won the City of London Midsummer Prize. In a 1982 interview with Bryan Robertson, she said: ‘Living rooms are not exactly enough. I enjoyed the drama of the exotic, which was what factories or industrial areas offered me.’ Her exhibitions included a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960, the Serpentine Art Gallery in 1976 and a highly acclaimed exhibition at Camden Art Centre in 1996. In the late summer of 1999 a retrospective of her work was held at Kettles Yard in Cambridge. That same year, she won the Jerwood Prize and declined the £30,000 prize money. Prunella Clough died on 26 December 1999, aged 80, following a battle with cancer. Athough critically acclaimed as one of the most interesting British artists of the postwar period and highly respected among her peers, she remains virtually unknown to the wider British public. Significant collections of her work are housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Clare College, Cambridge. In 2007 the Tate Gallery in London mounted a major retrospective of her work and reproduced her painting By the Canal upside down in the catalogue