Humphrey Spender's evocative paintingIndustrial Landscape with Pylons depictstowering, concrete columns that sap the colour, energy and life-force from the land. The work vividly echoes a poem by the artist's brother, Stephen Spender, entitled The Pylons. Both Stephen and Humphrey visualise these crude, utilitarian structures, stealing the mystery and depth of the ancient landscape whilst mocking its stone hills and cottages.

The painting was produced as part of the Mass-Observation Project, in which Spender was enlisted to help record the working-class conditions of people in Bolton and the Potteries alongside fellow Surrealist artists Humphrey Jennings and Julian Trevelyan. It was a groundbreaking social experiment that aimed to create 'an anthropology of ourselves', and to celebrate the importance of ordinary people and places, decades before groups such as the kitchen sink painters popularised this notion of social realism. Spender was also a talented documentary photographer, and took over 900 photographs of the people of Bolton within the public and private domains of work and leisure. Within this context he became aware of man's imprint on the land. Industrial Landscape with Pylons reflects these deep concerns, and seems to pre-empt the impending desolation that was about to sweep through Europe.