Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)

Graham Sutherland was a painter of imaginative landscapes, still life, figure pieces and portraits. He was born on 24th August 1903 in London. He abandoned a railway engineering apprenticeship after a year and studied at Goldsmiths' College School of Art, where he specialized in engraving and etching. Sutherland's formative influences on his early work were Blake, Samuel Palmer, the late Turner, Paul Nash and Henry Moore. Sutherland exhibited at the New English Art Club, 1929-33, and with the London Group from 1932, during which time he began experimenting with oil painting.

In 1936, he was invited by Sir Roland Penrose to submit paintings for the International Surrealist Exhibition, and held his first one-man exhibition of oil paintings two years later at the Paul Rosenberg and Helft Gallery. Sutherland was open to the idea of the chance encounter - excited by the poetry of analogies often inspired by found objects - but he was a solitary artist, and his intransigence and aims largely differed from those of the Surrealists. So while never an official member of the British Surrealist Group, the movement played an important role in crystalising Sutherland's vision as an artist. He later wrote:

"The field in which the surrealists helped me to widen my range was in their propagation of the idea that there was worthy subject matter for painting in objects the painter would never have looked at before... Surrealism helped me to realise that forms which interested me existed already in nature, and were waiting for me to find them."