Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) was one of the great British landscape painters and, during the 1940s and 50s, one of the most famous artists in this country. Initially inspired by the visionary landscapes of eighteenth and nineteenth-century artists such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, Sutherland transcended his influences to create a vocabulary that was uniquely his own. This show highlights the brilliant power of Sutherland’s imagination and demonstrates the diverse ways in which he transformed his experience of his environment.

The exhibition consists of striking, otherworldly landscapes from throughout Sutherland’s career: early, meticulous etchings which owe a debt to masters such as Rembrandt, Whistler and Palmer, wonderfully fluid drawings and iconic paintings from the 1930s and 40s with their haunting forms, sinuous lines and daring compositions, and mysterious late landscapes, rich in colour and often monumental in scale.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.