There is another painting of the same name in the Yale Centre for British Art, gifted by the Libra Foundation, from the family of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker (https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/midland-landscape-1958-247572), and Sunderland Museum holds a comparative work, Midland Landscape II (https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/midland-landscape-ii-35271).

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the British Midlands were a center of industrial production and, consequently, a nexus of anxiety about pollution. Slag heaps (piles of extractive waste) accumulated around coal mines and large factories belched out pervasive black smoke. Painter Prunella Clough, who lived and worked in London, was an unlikely visitor to these industrial sites. Yet it was here, in polluted landscapes that she referred to as “unconsidered,” that she experimented with abstraction. Paintings such as Midland Landscape precipitate an encounter between the anthropogenic waste that encroached on the visible landscape and the abstract idiom of postwar British painting.