Graham Sutherland, OM (1903-1980)

Sutherland was an English artist, notable for his work in glass, fabrics, prints and portraiture. His work was much inspired by landscape and religion, and he designed the tapestry for the re-built Coventry Cathedral.

Prints of romantic landscapes dominated Sutherland’s work during the 1920’s. He developed his art by working in watercolours before moving on to using oils in the 1940’s. It is these oils, often of surreal, organic landscapes of the Welsh coast, that secured his reputation as a leading modern artist in Britian. He taught at a number of art colleges including Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College, where he had been a student.

Between 1940-45, Sutherland was employed as official war artist. He recorded bomb damage in rural and urban Wales towards the end of 1940 and then bomb damage caused by the Blitz in the City and East End of London. Sutherland returned to Wales in 1941 to work on a series of paintings of blast furnaces. From June 1942 he painted further industrial scenes, first at tin mines in Cornwall, then at a limestone quarry in Derbyshire and then at open-cast and underground coal mines in South Wales. In 1944 Sutherland spent 4 months at the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich Arsenal working on a series of five paintings for WAAC. In December 1944 he was sent to depict the damage inflicted by the RAF on railway yards at Trappes and at flying bomb sites at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent in France.

He was commissioned to design an enormous tapestry in the new Coventry Cathedral. He also  completed a number of controversial portraits. Sir Winston Churchill famously hated Sutherland’s depiction of him and publicly humiliated him when the painting was unveiled. In 1955 Sutherland and his wife bought a house in Nice and living abroad led to a slight decline in his status in Britain. However, following a trip to Pembrokshire in 1967, his creativity was renewed and that went some way to restoring his reputation as a leading British artist.

 

Graham Sutherland, OM (1903-1980), Study: Tin Mine: Miner emerging from Stope, 1942

 

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Ink, pencil and chalk
7 ½ x 5 ¾ in (19 x 14.5 cm)
Inscribed Miner emerging from stope

Collections: Pier Paolo and Marzia Ruggerini, Milan; and thence by descent.

Exhibited: Palazzo Reale, Milan and the Accademia Ligustica, Genoa, Sutherland: Disegni di Guerra 1979 (87, repr. p.98); The Imperial War Museum, Sutherland: The War Drawings 1982 (82, repr. p. 40); The Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance and the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, Graham Sutherland: From Darkness into Light: Mining, Metal and Machines 2013-2014 (p. 19, repr.)

Literature: Douglas Cooper, Graham Sutherland, 1961 (46B, repr.)

In 1942 Sutherland, in his capacity as an official war artist, was commissioned to record the tin mines at Geevor in Cornwall. “To make drawings of the mines had only the vaguest relation to the war but I was certainly presented with a new world – and a world of such beauty and such mystery that I shall never forget it……”.

In Roger Berthoud’s opinion the tin mine drawings are “Sutherland’s finest work as a war artist.” Inspired by the dramatic subject matter and Henry Moore’s analogous series of Mining and Shelter drawings, Sutherland creates an extraordinarily vivid record of the miners’ claustrophobic world. This is a preliminary study for one of the best- known works in the series, now in the Leeds City Art Galleries. Sutherland annotated another sketch for the work ‘’ suggest miner in distance coming round curve of stope (very strong feeling of shut-in-ness and weight of stone). Miner emerges from entrance of stope. Very mysterious. Approach associated with noise of boots and falling stones and with approaching light of lamp’’ (Tate Gallery Sutherland 1982 p.99).

This drawing was part of the group bought by Pier Paolo and Marzia Ruggerini at the time of the exhibition of Sutherland’s war-time drawings organised by the British Council in Milan in 1979. The Ruggerinis first met Sutherland in 1965. Pier Paolo was a well-known Italian film maker and in 1967 his documentary on the artist led Sutherland to return to Wales to paint there for the first time in twenty years. The Ruggerinis became great friends and collectors of Sutherland. Their house, Il Castello in Pavia near Milan, had a celebrated collection of the artist’s work.

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