Richard Eurich was born in Bradford in 1903 and trained at Bradford School for Arts and Crafts and at University College London's Slade School of Fine Art. He was an Official War Artist with the Royal Navy from 1941 to 1945 and taught at Camberwell College of Art from 1949 to 1967. He was influenced as a young man by Wyndham Lewis, William Rothenstein and by Surrealism. A friend of Edward Wadsworth, he painted in a modern figurative idiom during the 1930s. His wartime work was very well known, and he achieved a reputation almost equal to that of Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash, but after the War, unallied to any group or movement, he was increasingly seen as outside the mainstream of progressive art. He lived for much of his life near Southampton. A painter of fishing villages and of beaches, he painted Pennine landscapes throughout his life and occasionally worked in Wales. This view of an empty hillside rising to blot out much of the sky is deceptively simple, evoking a sense of place.