In 1932, the critic, artist and museum administrator D. S. MacColl reviewed the second volume of memoirs penned by his friend and contemporary, the artist William Rothenstein (1872–1945). The review provided an excuse to look back over the past thirty or forty years of art and to reflect upon Rothenstein's position within it. MacColl paints a swift but familiar picture of modern art, one in which ‘representation has been having a poor time’ and ‘design has decided to set up for itself’ (p. 76). In ‘preaching a fuller immersion in the subject, and development of design from within it, instead of a clamp from without’, Rothenstein appears to fall into what was, by 1932, something of an aesthetic hinterland – not abstract enough to be fully ‘modern’, yet clearly speaking the language of what, in response to Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition, we now call Post-Impressionism. The obvious touchstone here, as MacColl realises, is Paul Cézanne, for whom Rothenstein had equivocal admiration. MacColl and Rothenstein clearly differ in their estimation of the French artist; nonetheless, MacColl recognises in this review that Rothenstein's critical doctrine was built on similar foundations, even if the results looked a little different.

The review celebrates few specific examples of Rothenstein's work, but mentions in passing a painting to which MacColl refers, intriguingly, as having been ‘born too soon’ (p. 77). This painting, titled The Deserted Quarry (Plate 3) and completed in 1904, may seem a somewhat surprising work to be plucked out of the artist's oeuvre and be remarked upon for its innovation. The Deserted Quarry had hitherto, and has since, attracted much less critical attention than other works by Rothenstein; the more obviously modern subject matter of urban scenes has tended to suit popular narratives of early twentieth-century British art. This is not a surprise: the painting is distinctly gloomy and brooding, even romantic, and seems at first sight to have been born in the nineteenth century. Despite the Impressionistic handling and what one critic described as its ‘curiously original’ design, exemplified by the high horizon and bold placing of the diagonal derrick that cuts across the top third of the canvas, the subject is not what most would expect from a modern painting.