Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland

1903 - 1980

Graham Sutherland was an influential and imaginative British artist. Renowned for his visionary landscapes and religious iconography, he also worked as a war artist during World War II.
Following his early work on landscapes in Pembrokeshire, Sutherland spent three years from 1941 working on the Home Front depicting mining, industry, and bomb damage.

A convert to Catholicism, he moved on to religious work - including designing Christ In Glory In The Tetramorph, a tapestry for Coventry Cathedral - and further nature paintings.

Sutherland painted Winston Churchill in 1954, but the prime minister hated the result. His wife, Lady Churchill, burned the painting after her husband’s death.

In the 1960s, Sutherland returned to Pembrokeshire, where he found further inspiration for nature work and founded a gallery; he also began to explore mythology in two of his last pieces, The Bees And Apollinaire: Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée.