Although Paul Gough writes that Gilbert Spencer was rather unsentimental about the countryside, his depictions of rural life very often reveal his beliefs on the working rights of rural labourers. Frequently they include the very tools and man-made structures that allow people to govern the environment, most notably in his large-scale painting, ‘A Cotswold Farm’ (Tate Collection), which depicts a bustling farm set around horse-driven carts, an area of personal interest to the artist. Like his fascination with the mechanical technicality of carts, Spencer was captivated by the construction of fencing and there are many examples of pencil studies that he undertook on the subject. In the present work, the fencing encasing the vegetable plot takes precedence, with the foreground defined by a rogue horizontal rail. Pictured at dusk, the farm looks idyllic, with its glaucous blue-green vegetables contrasting against the warm, earthy tones of exposed soil and sunlight-faded skies - but at the composition’s heart lies the fencing and, in its irregular construction, a reminder of the relationships between man and nature in agriculture.