Graham Sutherland valuation
Painter of thorns, Pembrokeshire and the Coventry tapestry, and of the Churchill portrait that was destroyed.
Graham Sutherland was born in Streatham in 1903 and, after an engineering apprenticeship at the Midland Railway works in Derby, studied at Goldsmiths' School of Art from 1921 to 1926, specialising in etching and engraving.
What a work by Graham Sutherland is worth
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Bio
Graham Sutherland was born in Streatham in 1903 and, after an engineering apprenticeship at the Midland Railway works in Derby, studied at Goldsmiths' School of Art from 1921 to 1926, specialising in etching and engraving. Through the 1920s he made romantic landscape prints, and in the 1930s, after visits to Pembrokeshire, he turned to painting the Welsh landscape in strange, organic forms that made his name. As an official war artist he painted bomb damage, blast furnaces and mines, completing some 150 works. After the war his Crucifixion of 1946 for St Matthew's Church in Northampton led to paintings combining thorns and religious imagery, and he designed the great tapestry Christ in Glory for the new Coventry Cathedral. He received the Order of Merit in 1960, lived partly in the south of France from 1955, and died in 1980.
Sutherland was prolific in oil, gouache, watercolour, drawing and print, and works on paper and prints come up regularly; studies for the portraits and for the Coventry tapestry have their own interest. A provenance through his dealers or his estate is usual.
Pembrokeshire, Coventry and the Churchill portrait
His 1954 portrait of Winston Churchill, commissioned by both Houses of Parliament for the prime minister's eightieth birthday, was disliked by its sitter and later destroyed on Lady Churchill's orders.
A return to Pembrokeshire in 1967, his first in more than twenty years, renewed his work there, and he gave a large group of works to found a gallery at Picton Castle, which opened in 1976.
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