Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)

Sutherland spent a year as an apprentice engineering draughtsman before entering Goldsmith’s College in London, where he studied etching and engraving (1921-26). During the 1920s he worked as a printmaker, and had two one-man exhibitions of prints and drawings at the Twenty-One Gallery (1925 and 1928). He was also a designer of posters, fabrics and ceramics. He taught at the Chelsea School of Art from 1926 to 1940, firstly engraving, later, composition and book illustration. He was a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1926-33), and exhibited with the New English Art Club and the London Group in the 1930s. He turned to painting in oils in the early 1930s, and participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.

During the Second World War Sutherland was an Official War Artist. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he carried out a series of portrait commissions, among them Somerset Maugham, Lord Beaverbrook and, most notoriously, in 1954, Winston Churchill. This latter painting was so detested by its subject that it was later destroyed by Lady Churchill. In 1951 he designed a mural, The Origins of the Land, for the Festival of Britain, and the following year designed a huge tapestry, Christ the Redeemer Enthroned in Glory, for the high altar in the new Coventry Cathedral (it was installed in 1962). Sutherland exhibited in the 1952 Venice Biennale, and at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1955. Retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951, at the Musée National de l’Art Moderne in Paris in 1952, and at the Tate Gallery in 1953.