Graham Sutherland

Graham Vivian Sutherland (24 August 1903 – 17 February 1980) was a prolific English artist. Notable for his paintings of abstract landscapes and for his portraits of public figures, Sutherland also worked in other media, including printmaking, tapestry and glass design.

Printmaking, mostly of romantic landscapes, dominated Sutherland's work during the 1920s. He developed his art by working in watercolours before switching to using oil paints in the 1940s. A series of surreal oil paintings depicting the Pembrokeshire landscape secured his reputation as a leading British modern artist. He served as an official war artist in the Second World War, painting industrial scenes on the British home front. After the war, Sutherland embraced figurative painting, beginning with his 1946 work, The Crucifixion. Subsequent paintings combined religious symbolism with motifs from nature, such as thorns.

Such was Sutherland's standing in post-war Britain that he was commissioned to design the massive central tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral, Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph. A number of portrait commissions in the 1950s proved highly controversial. Winston Churchill hated Sutherland's depiction of him and subsequently Lady Spencer-Churchill had the painting destroyed.

During his career, Sutherland taught at a number of art colleges, notably at Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmiths College, where he had been a student. In 1955, Sutherland and his wife purchased a property near Nice. Living abroad led to something of a decline in his status in Britain. However, a visit to Pembrokeshire in 1967, his first trip there in nearly twenty years, led to a creative renewal that went some way toward restoring his reputation as a leading British artist.

Biography

Early life

Graham Sutherland was born in Streatham, London, the eldest of three children of George Humphrey Vivian Sutherland (1873–1952), a barrister who later became a civil servant in the Land Registry and the Board of Education, and his wife Elsie (1877–1957), née Foster. Both were amateur painters and musicians. Graham Sutherland attended Homefield Preparatory School in Sutton and was then educated at Epsom College in Surrey until 1919. Upon leaving school, after some preliminary coaching in art, Sutherland began an engineering apprenticeship at the Midland Railway locomotive works in Derby where several members of the extended Sutherland family had previously worked. After a year, Sutherland succeeded in persuading his father that he was not destined for a career in engineering and that he should be allowed to study art. After failing to gain a place at his first choice, the Slade School of Art, he entered Goldsmiths' School of Art in 1921, specialising in engraving and etching before graduating in 1926. In both 1925 and 1928, Sutherland exhibited drawings and engravings at the XXI Gallery in London. While still a student, Sutherland established a reputation as a fine printmaker and commercial printmaking would be his main source of income throughout the late 1920s. His early paintings were mainly landscapes and show an affinity with the work of Paul Nash. In 1934, Sutherland visited Pembrokeshire in Wales for the first time and was profoundly inspired by its landscape. The region remained a source for his paintings for much of the following decade and he visited the area each year until the start of the Second World War. As the 1930s progressed and the political situation in Europe grew worse, he began to depict ominous, distorted human forms emerging from the land. Oil paintings of the Pembrokeshire landscape dominated his first one-man exhibition of paintings, held in September 1938 at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.

Alongside oil painting, Sutherland also took up glass design, fabric design, and poster design during the 1930s, and taught engraving at the Chelsea School of Art from 1926. Between 1940 and 1945, Sutherland was employed as a full-time, salaried artist by the War Artists' Advisory Committee. He recorded bomb damage in rural and urban Wales towards the end of 1940, then bomb damage caused by the Blitz in the City and East End of London. Almost all of Sutherland's paintings of bomb damage from the Blitz, either in Wales or in London, are titled Devastation:... and as such form a single body of work reflecting the needs of war-time propaganda, with precise locations not being disclosed and human remains not shown. A number of features reoccur within this body of work, for example, the fallen lift shafts that were often the most recognizable aspect of larger bombed buildings and a double row of bombed houses Sutherland saw in the Silvertown area of the East End. In December 1944, he was sent to depict the damage inflicted by the RAF on the railway yards at Trappes and on the flying bomb sites at Saint-Leu-d'Esserent in France. In all, Sutherland completed some 150 paintings as part of his WAAC commission. This was Sutherland's first major religious painting and his first large figure study. The elderly Churchill had wanted to direct the composition towards a fictionalised scene but Sutherland had insisted upon a realistic portrayal, one described by Simon Schama as "No bulldog, no baby face. Just an obituary in paint". Although the painting was subsequently destroyed on the orders of Lady Spencer-Churchill, some of Sutherland's studies for the portrait have survived. In all, Sutherland painted more than fifty portraits, often of European aristocrats or senior businessmen. Following the Churchill portrait, Sutherland's portraits of, among others, Konrad Adenauer and the Queen Mother established him as something of an unofficial state portrait painter. This status was underlined by the award of the Order of Merit in 1960. He exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952 along with Edward Wadsworth and the New Aspects of British Sculpture Group. From 1948 until 1954, Sutherland served as a trustee of the Tate gallery.

In early 1954, Sutherland was commissioned to design a monumental tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral. Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph took three years to complete and was installed in 1962. To complete the work, Sutherland visited the weavers, of Felletin in France, on nine occasions.

Legacy

The main building of Coventry School of Art and Design, part of Coventry University, is named after Sutherland. A radio play, Portrait of Winston, by Jonathan Smith, is a dramatisation of his portrait of Winston Churchill. The same incident features in the Netflix series, The Crown, in which Sutherland is played by Stephen Dillane, and was discussed by Simon Schama in his 2015 BBC television series The Face of Britain by Simon Schama. Works by Sutherland are held in the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, Tenby Museum and Art Gallery, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The Priseman Seabrook Collection, and The Phillips Collection.

In April 2025, an English Heritage blue plaque was dedicated to him at his childhood home, on Dorset Road in Merton Park, South London.

Honours and awards

1960 – Order of Merit
1962 – Honorary Doctor of Letters, Oxford University
1972 – Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1973 – Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, France
1973 – Fellow of the Accademia di San Luca, Italy
1974 – Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg

Graham Sutherland

Biography

Early life

Legacy

Honours and awards

References

Further reading

External links