Provenance: with Caroline Wiseman to January, 2004; purchased from a private collector; artist's studio.

Both sun and moon were longstanding sources of inspiration for Terry Frost, and the present work could be taken as fusing elements of both celestial bodies. In a 1979 interview Frost said: "Now there are those big black circles. I have always been a sun lover and a moon lover - not that I know anything about it psychologically - it's to do with the things that are always there in spite of our world's problems. If you look at the sun for a moment you experience black spots; if you go out in the cold the moon becomes blue; and in the heat the sun becomes black ; and so in my paintings a big black circle is to do with the sun. In Burnt Norton T. S. Eliot wrote: 'Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away.' And yet the sun breaks out from the edges of the black cloud, something which everyone sees but doesn't notice, and I have tried to turn it into a compelling image." [Terry Frost by David Lewis, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, 1994: p. 188].