Signed and dated pencil on paper.

Even in the earliest Social Realist paintings of his youth, Farrington’s ‘Black Country’ never quite lived up to its name. The blast furnaces, factories, brickworks and steel mills of Charles Dickens’ 19th century West Midlands, which famously ‘poured out their plague of smoke and made foul the melancholy air,’ are rarely to be seen in their hellish entirety. Much of that industrial world Farrington locked behind garden walls, or left lurking forbiddingly on the horizons of rolling wastegrounds populated with wild horses.