Prunella Clough was described by the critic John Berger as 'one of the most developed and serious English painters of her generation'. She was drawn to urban industry within which she saw a unique poetic beauty. Having painted Lowestoft fishermen in the 1940s, Clough then turned her attention inland, towards the workmen, builders and labourers, lorry drivers and construction workers of the inner city. Lorries and their drivers in particular formed a significant part of her ouevre in the early 1950s. 'Lorry Drivers' hovers between abstraction and figuration with a restricted palette of dirty creams, burnt orange and umbers which unifies the compositional elements and evokes the atmospheric grime of the labourer’s world.

As Frances Spalding writes about the Lorry Drivers series: ‘In the docklands area, she watched lorries arriving and departing, and the labour involved, in this pre-container age, in the loading and unloading of their cargoes. No artist had previously given such attention to the shapes and activities associated with lorries, with their sturdy wing mirrors, their flat-roofed box-like cabs, their varied cargoes, and how they fitted into the urban or industrial landscape. The semi-cubist faceting of form, which she had developed to a pitch of sophistication in Lowestoft Harbour is still evident here, but less dominant; for it as if she was surprised by the formal relationships offered by these vehicles and wanted to get closer to them. At first sight, the drivers in their cabs, in their workman’s caps, are as anonymous as are her fisherman. But when she closes in, on the driver framed by his cab window, we gain an unexpectedly intimate glimpse into moments of waiting, when the driver takes a nap or reads a newspaper, while all around his cabined world are hints of the larger environment, a factory chimney, a segment of a crane, pointed roofs and a coil of rope, bleak reminders that his release from labour is only temporary (see F. Spalding, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped, Farnham, 2012, p. 101).