Cornish Landscape with Roller

I remember that one evening Andrew Patrick, then Managing Director of the Fine Art Society, was at a dinner party in my flat, and happened to be sitting opposite this painting. But no sooner has he sat down than he got up excitedly for a closer look at it. It turned out that he was helping to organise a touring retrospective [organised by Bradford's Cartwright Hall 1979-80] of your father's work . . . He told me that this was the first work from the Thirties they had been able to trace . . . Andrew asked me to lend the picture to the show, which of course I happily did. I thought then, as I think now, that your father has been one of the most shamefully under-estimated of 20th-century British artists, so I am very happy that he seems now to be reclaiming his place in the sun.

Although on the surface this painting is a straight landscape, there seems to be a surreal undercurrent running through it.  A roller appears again later in a 1948 painting The Battle of the Boggarts , but this time the surreal element is much more full blown.