A PAINTING of industrial furnaces by an artist best known for his surreal West Wales landscapes is expected to fetch up to £80,000 at auction next month.

Graham Sutherland found himself in the steel foundries of Cardiff and Swansea when during the Second World War he became one of the first artists “recruited” by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) scheme.

The combination of the industrial architecture and chemical processes gave him ample subject matter to create images at once factual and fantastical.

Experts say that while on the surface his work is a depiction of an industrial process essential to the war effort, in Furnaces, Sutherland has transformed it into a source of wonder.

The furnaces become something more than just bricks and metal components with tongues of flame and the whole suffused in a bright glow.

Sutherland himself wrote that while depicting the furnaces he was influenced by Picasso’s cubist style, featuring semi-abstract images of a ravaged landscape.

Once a household name in Britain, Sutherland wrote: “The conception of the idea of stress, both physical and mental, and how forms can be modified by emotion had been, even before the war, much in mind.

“It was crystallised and strengthened by my understanding of Picasso’s studies of Guernica. As the hand feeds the mouth, so did the long scoops which plunged into the furnace openings feed them, and the metal containers pouring molten iron into ladles had great encrusted mouths.”

Sutherland became one of the most famous artists in the world in the 1930s and 1940s, largely due to his passion for painting the Pembrokeshire landscape.

Furnaces, in ink wash, gouache, oil, coloured crayon and charcoal on board will feature in Sotheby’s sale of Modern & Post-War British Art on May 10.