Kilnhurst

Kilnhurst is a village in South Yorkshire, which built up around the coal mining, ceramics, glass, brick-making and railway industries. Charles Holmes regularly painted industrial and urban views, showing an interest in geometrical shapes within a landscape. Here the village's factories and chimneys are set starkly against a dull, lowering sky. On the reverse of this sheet is a view of a gentle hilly landscape, a startling contrast to the dark buildings and bare land on the front, but showing Holmes's interest in both sides of rural England in the 1930s.