South London-born Graham Sutherland was one of the leading English painters of the mid-twentieth century, and is best known for his unsettling landscape paintings. He also painted war art during the Second World War, and post-war church commissions.
At the age of sixteen Sutherland was apprenticed as an engineer at the midland railway works in Derby, but he soon persuaded his father to let him give up engineering to become an artist, entering Goldsmith’s College of Art in 1921.
Specialising in etching he became entranced by the prints and drawings of the Romantic painter Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), whose influence is detectable in his ‘Neo-Romantic’, surrealist-infused landscape paintings of the late 1930s and 1940s. His works of the 1920s, however, have more in common with a London printmaking tradition that harks back to the mid nineteenth-century etching of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).
In 1940 Graham Sutherland was appointed an official war artist and tasked with recording war damage in Swansea and London. The Museum of London holds a collection of eleven watercolour drawings from Sutherland’s ‘Devastation’ series, all depicting bomb-damaged buildings in the City of London and East End. These semi-abstract images capture the uncanny feeling of the familiar urban landscape suddenly appearing unrecognisable as buildings are opened up and their structures are burnt, twisted and discoloured.
His experiences of the war, especially of human suffering which is masked in his Devastation drawings, fed into the religious works that Sutherland (a convert to Roman Catholicism) produced in the late 1940s and 1950s; most notably his design for a huge tapestry at the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. He was increasingly occupied with portraiture during the 1950s and 1960s, but returned, not only to landscape and nature themes, but also to printmaking in his final years.