Sam Haile denounced the aggressive social and political forces of 1930's Europe. The often disturbing and violent imagery of his art decried the spread of Fascism throughout Europe and the empires of the Western capitalist states, whose overseas dominions had expanded after the First World War. Dry Bones is widely believed to articulate Haile's despair at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the painting, carcasses litter a desert plain. The bones themselves, entwined with the legs of a giant tarantula, take on the organic forms of his pottery, for which Haile became best known.

And yet within such savage images there is - as Haile's friend, Charles Seward observed - a 'poetic sense of wonder and mystery, a sense of the revelation of 'deep-guarded secrets', which hint at least at the forces by which man can sustain his agonies and survive them'. He continued to write that the brilliant directness and economy of Haile's painting is nowhere better seen than in the oils executed between 1937-39: 'the execution is often of the greatest delicacy and elegance of line; the contour often beautiful'.