During the Second World War Sutherland was commissioned as an official war artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee. Sutherland had been hesitant as to how he could respond as an artist to the commission as his work had been concerned with ‘the more hidden aspects of nature’, works that attempted to ‘paraphrase what (he) saw and ...which were parallel to rather than a copy of nature’.

Sutherland visited Derbyshire in the spring of 1943 to work in the quarries belonging to the Lime Division of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. He worked mainly in Hindlow near Buxton, which had both quarries and kilns; most of the stone was used for making soda ash for the glass industry. Sutherland found the quarries a ‘chaos of form’ and made few drawings in the quarries except for studies of rocks and boulders, but made numerous drawings in his notebook of possible ideas for pictures that were later worked up into more finished works.

This work was presented to the Collection by the War Artists' Advisory Committee.

Further reading
Roberto Tassi, Sutherland The Wartime Drawings , Electa Editrice, Milan 1979/ Sotheby Parke Bernet, London 1980
Sutherland The War Drawings, Imperial War Museum, London, 1982