Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners

Spencer received a commission from the War Artist's Advisory Committee on 6 June 1940 to record the war effort by focusing on the shipbuilding industry. 'Burners' was the first of the shipbuilding works to be finished and was based on drawings made in May 1940 at Lithgow's shipyards on the Clyde in Port Glasgow. The work was executed from July to August 1940 at the White Hart Inn in Leonard Stanley. The painting is made up of three canvases, an arrangement which allowed for the central section to be increased. From his diary entries, it is apparent that Spencer painted the picture in patches, doing a figure in one place then moving to a metal plate in another section of the canvas. The work appeared in the War Artist's Exhibition at the National Gallery in October 1940.Spencer's shipbuilding drawings show a fascination with the components and machinery of the yards and the skill of the workers manipulating them. Their job was to cut the steel plates with oxy-acetylene torches, following the complex chalk lines the machines could not manage. In a letter from Spencer to Elmslie Owen at the Ministry of Information in November 1942, he described the work: 'In this burners painting I have treated the burners as a series of decorative figures because of the interesting variety of positions they naturally assume.'