Walk along the Quay; Black, Grey and White is one of a small series of seminal early 1950 works by Terry Frost. Early each morning the artist would take his young son Adrian for a walk along the quayside of Smeaton's Pier in St Ives, then still a working port. Of the Walk along the Quay series Frost said: "(They) came from a true walk, a regular morning stroll and the constant movement always (without deep art thought, always the killer of inspiration and imagination) intrigued me. The size of the canvas … had to conform to my idea, the walk, so it was long, like the quay and narrow. Everything was happening below me so I think for the first time I managed to paint up the canvas or along the canvas, like I walked along the quay, in fact I just walked up the canvas with paint".  That wonderfully evocative last phrase of Frost's, "I just walked up the canvas with paint", is one of the most quoted by the artist. 

In 1951 Ben Nicholson arranged for the first major incantation of Walk along the Quay to be shown into the Artists International Associations Abstract Art show in connection with Festival of Britain, alongside his own work and those of Barbara Hepworth, Adrian Heath, Victor Pasmore, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham and Roger Hilton.

Walk along the Quay; Black, Grey and White (1953) is painted on a tall, thin board that helps evoke the quayside walk and the inherently narrow but long space of the pier. After silently studying the 1951 version for two hours, Ben Nicholson told Terry Frost: "You’ve got the shapes there that you’ll probably use for the rest of your life".

Another version of Walk Along the Quay is held in the collection of the Leeds City Museum. Our painting, Walk along the Quay; Black, Grey and White, was exhibited in the Tate St Ives in June 1994. It was owned by Clifford Ellis (1907 – 1985), renowned British artist and print maker, and later by Graham and Mollie Dark, patrons to pivotal figures in the St. Ives Modernist School, including Frost, Lanyon and Feiler. The painting represents an increasingly rare opportunity to acquire a genuine piece of St Ives Modernist history.