Rich rewards

For as long as I’ve been interested in Modern British art, I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by the work of Graham Sutherland (1903–80). One of the first Cork Street exhibitions I went to as a schoolboy was of paintings, gouaches, watercolours and graphics by Sutherland from the collection of Douglas Cooper, held at the Redfern Gallery in the autumn of 1976. I was enormously impressed, particularly by the golden-eyed toad rampant, the thorny sentinel figures, a 1944 Welsh landscape and a gouache of bomb-damaged buildings from 1942. (My recall is not always quite so accurate: in fact, I have the fold-out card from the exhibition before me as I write.) Only much later did I learn that the reason the great collector and art historian Douglas Cooper was selling his Sutherlands was that he had fallen out with the artist — not an unusual occurrence for such a touchy and irascible man — and wished publicly to withdraw his favour, having long been a committed Sutherland supporter.

Sutherland’s reputation at that time stood very high, and his prices reflected his widespread popularity. His work was admired and collected on the continent, the Italians being especially avid in their pursuit of his graphics, of which there was a correspondingly wide variety. Sutherland lived mostly abroad, and had acquired the status of an honorary European, despite the many powerful landscapes he had made in this country, very much in the English romantic tradition, before the end of the second world war.

It was said by some that he had lost his inspiration by moving to the south of France, and severed an involvement with the spirit of place that had been forged in Pembrokeshire in the 1930s. Actually, Sutherland had already started to go back to Pembrokeshire, and to reconnect with the sources of his vision.