Sutherland, Graham (1903–1980). British painter, printmaker, and designer, born in London, the son of a high-ranking civil servant. He abandoned an apprenticeship as a railway engineer to study engraving and etching at Goldsmiths' College, London, 1921–6, and up to 1930 he worked exclusively as a printmaker, specializing in landscape etchings in the visionary Romantic tradition of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer. From 1926 to 1935 he taught engraving at Chelsea School of Art, and from 1935 to 1940 he taught composition and book illustration there. In the early 1930s, following a decline in the market for prints, Sutherland began experimenting with oils, and by 1935 he had turned mainly to painting. Again he initially concentrated on landscape, his paintings showing a highly subjective response to nature, inspired mainly by visits to Pembrokeshire, where he went every summer from 1934 until the outbreak of the Second World War. His landscapes are not topographical, but semi-abstract compositions of haunting and monstrous shapes rendered in distinctive acidic colouring, evoking what he called the ‘exultant strangeness’ of the place (
Entrance to a Lane, Tate Gallery, London, 1939). During the 1930s Sutherland also designed posters, and it was at an exhibition of posters in 1935 that his work first attracted the attention of Kenneth
Clark, who became an important patron and a close friend.
From 1940 to 1945 Sutherland worked as an Official War Artist, mainly recording the effects of bombing; his poignant pictures of shattered buildings rank among the most famous images of the home front. Soon after the war he took up religious painting and portraiture, and it was in these two fields that he chiefly made his mark in his later career, showing his characteristic love of a fresh challenge: ‘I have never disliked working outside my normal scope and it interests me to try and solve new problems.’ His first religious work (or his first since student days) was a large and powerful
Crucifixion (1946) for St Matthew's, Northampton (the commission was given to Sutherland when he was present at the unveiling of Henry
Moore's Madonna and Child in this church in 1944). Both the Moore sculpture and the Sutherland painting were commissioned by Canon Walter Hussey (1909–85), later Dean of Chichester, ‘one of the most remarkable contemporary ecclesiastical patrons of music and art, a man never content with anything but the best’ ( John Hayes,
The Art of Graham Sutherland, 1980). He described Sutherland's
Crucifixion as ‘profoundly disturbing and purging'. Sutherland's first portrait was that of Somerset Maugham (Tate Gallery, 1949), commissioned by the sitter. It has an almost caricature quality (Maugham's friend Sir Gerald
Kelly said it made him look ‘like an old Chinese madam in a brothel in Shanghai'), and another famous portrait, that of Winston Churchill (1954), was so hated by the sitter (who thought it made him look ‘half-witted') that Lady Churchill had it secretly destroyed. Sutherland's most celebrated work, however, has become widely popular—it is the immense tapestry of
Christ in Glory (completed 1962) in Coventry Cathedral. In addition to such figure subjects Sutherland continued to paint landscapes—many of them inspired by the French Riviera, where he lived for part of every year from 1947—and late in his career he returned to printmaking, producing coloured lithographs. He was prodigiously hardworking, his output also including ceramics and designs for stage sets and costumes.
Sutherland was one of the most celebrated British artists of the 20th century and he received many honours, notably the Order of Merit in 1960. Douglas
Cooper described him as ‘the most distinguished and the most original English artist of the mid-20th century … no other English painter can compare with Sutherland in the subtlety of his vision, in the forcefulness of his imagery and in the sureness of his touch. And there is none whose sensibility and inspiration are so unmistakably and naturally English, yet whose handling and technical approach are so authoritative, modern and European’ (
The Work of Graham Sutherland, 1961). He had a high reputation outside Britain; in 1952, for example, he had retrospectives at the Venice
Biennale and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and Kenneth Clark wrote that ‘perhaps no other English painter since Constable has been received with so much respect in the critical atmosphere of Paris'. Indeed in his later career Sutherland was generally more admired by foreign than by British critics, who tended to find his work old-fashioned. Examples are in numerous major collections, and the Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle in Dyfed (formerly Pembrokeshire) opened to the public in 1976.
