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Lot Essay
These two pictures (lots 77 and 78) are very different manifestations of a single strand of imagery in Sutherland's work, rooted in the pictorial transformation of sensations and experiences absorbed during his recurrent trips to West Pembrokeshire in the late 1930s. Indeed, the immense excitement of the area for Sutherland was associated with his discovery that walking through this remote landscape could suddenly yield up experiences of revelatory force and mysterious intensity, what the poet William Wordsworth would have termed 'moments of vision'. Sutherland developed the habit of taking a sketchbook with him, so that he could record the motifs that spoke to him in this way. These studies might then become the basis for further drawings and possibly for paintings, executed back in his studio in Kent. He felt that such detachment from the actual place enabled him to subordinate observed detail to a language of abstracted forms and heightened colours, and thus more effectively to distil the emotional and visual impact of his original sensations in the landscape.
Sutherland described one especially vivid experience of the Pembrokeshire landscape in his 1942 essay 'Welsh Sketch Book': 'Fortunately, we missed the road and found ourselves descending a green lane buried in trees, which, quite unexpectedly, led to a litle cove and beach by the banks of a narrow estuary ... The tide in the estuary (or pill, as such inlets are called here) is out and we walk across the sandy bed of the opening and look down its winding length to the place where it narrows to the upper end.
'I wish I could give you some idea of the exultant strangeness of this place - for strange it certainly is, many people whom I know hate it, and I cannot but admit that it possesses an element of disquiet. The left bank as we see it is all dark - an impenetrable damp green gloom of woods which run down to the edge of low blackish moss-covered cliffs - it is all dark, save where the mossy lanes (two each side) which dive down to the opening, admit the sun, hinged, as it were, to the top of the trees, from where its rays, precipitating new colours, turn the red cliffs of the right-hand bank to tones of fire. Do you remember the rocks in Blake's 'Newton' drawing? The form and scale of the rocks here, and the minutiae on them, is very similar.
'The whole setting is one of exuberance - of darkness and light - of decay and life. Rarely have I been so conscious of the contrasting of these elements in so small a compass'.1
This provides a close verbal equivalent to imagery that Sutherland had already realised in paint in one of his key early masterpieces, the Tate Gallery's Entrance to a Lane, 1939. In the picture, the combinations of dark shadow and strong light, flat shapes and a funnel of space receding emphatically into depth, create a pictorial expression of the ambiguous mood, the sensations of elation but also foreboding, in short the sense of 'exultant strangeness', that Sutherland elaborated in his essay. Tree Forms in Estuary, completed a year or so later, in water-based paint on paper rather than oil on canvas, seems to refer to either the same or a very similar experience, though the imagery and sense of space are far more abstract and ambiguous. The isolated rhomboidal shape at the centre suggests the opening at the far end of one of the dark, enclosed lanes that Sutherland describes, while the larger forms in the foreground presumably relate to his interception that 'the black-green ribs of half-buried wrecks and the phantom tree roots, bleached and washed by the waves, exist but to emphasize the extraordinary completeness of the scene'. In contrast to the Tate picture, it is much harder to gauge the scale, let alone the precise identity, of the various elements represented in the picture. The degree of abstraction, along with the muted colour scheme and angular, semi-geometric shapes, may indicate an interest in the late Cubist work of George Braque. There were several Braque shows in London during the 1930s, which Sutherland could easily have seen, and the analogy was made by critics in reviews of his early one-man shows.
Around the end of the Second World War, having spent several years working as an official War Artist, Sutherland clearly experienced a powerful need to get back to his own work, and to pick up where he had left off. The several new versions he made of the lane entrance motif, including several large oils, are a case in point. All feature the centralised pocket of space, receding into depth, flanked by curved, rhythmically organised black shapes, and surmounted by passages evoking foliage. Lane Entrance (lot 78) is an especially ordered, symmetrical version of the idea, and formed the basis for a larger work on paper Entrance to Lane with Interlacing Foliage.2 The perspectival clarity of the composition also recalls contemporary pictures such as Landscape with Rocks, 1945 (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum). Bold drawing and brushmarks coexist in Lane Entrance, as in many such small-scale Sutherlands, with the fastidious squaring up in pencil that Sutherland subsequently applied in order to transfer his idea from a sketchbook to a larger format.
1 G. Sutherland, 'Welsh Sketch Book', Horizon, London, April 1942, pp. 225-235.
2 Pen, chalk and gouache (present whereabouts unknown), illustrated in D. Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, London, 1961, pl. 68c.
M.H.
Sutherland described one especially vivid experience of the Pembrokeshire landscape in his 1942 essay 'Welsh Sketch Book': 'Fortunately, we missed the road and found ourselves descending a green lane buried in trees, which, quite unexpectedly, led to a litle cove and beach by the banks of a narrow estuary ... The tide in the estuary (or pill, as such inlets are called here) is out and we walk across the sandy bed of the opening and look down its winding length to the place where it narrows to the upper end.
'I wish I could give you some idea of the exultant strangeness of this place - for strange it certainly is, many people whom I know hate it, and I cannot but admit that it possesses an element of disquiet. The left bank as we see it is all dark - an impenetrable damp green gloom of woods which run down to the edge of low blackish moss-covered cliffs - it is all dark, save where the mossy lanes (two each side) which dive down to the opening, admit the sun, hinged, as it were, to the top of the trees, from where its rays, precipitating new colours, turn the red cliffs of the right-hand bank to tones of fire. Do you remember the rocks in Blake's 'Newton' drawing? The form and scale of the rocks here, and the minutiae on them, is very similar.
'The whole setting is one of exuberance - of darkness and light - of decay and life. Rarely have I been so conscious of the contrasting of these elements in so small a compass'.
This provides a close verbal equivalent to imagery that Sutherland had already realised in paint in one of his key early masterpieces, the Tate Gallery's Entrance to a Lane, 1939. In the picture, the combinations of dark shadow and strong light, flat shapes and a funnel of space receding emphatically into depth, create a pictorial expression of the ambiguous mood, the sensations of elation but also foreboding, in short the sense of 'exultant strangeness', that Sutherland elaborated in his essay. Tree Forms in Estuary, completed a year or so later, in water-based paint on paper rather than oil on canvas, seems to refer to either the same or a very similar experience, though the imagery and sense of space are far more abstract and ambiguous. The isolated rhomboidal shape at the centre suggests the opening at the far end of one of the dark, enclosed lanes that Sutherland describes, while the larger forms in the foreground presumably relate to his interception that 'the black-green ribs of half-buried wrecks and the phantom tree roots, bleached and washed by the waves, exist but to emphasize the extraordinary completeness of the scene'. In contrast to the Tate picture, it is much harder to gauge the scale, let alone the precise identity, of the various elements represented in the picture. The degree of abstraction, along with the muted colour scheme and angular, semi-geometric shapes, may indicate an interest in the late Cubist work of George Braque. There were several Braque shows in London during the 1930s, which Sutherland could easily have seen, and the analogy was made by critics in reviews of his early one-man shows.
Around the end of the Second World War, having spent several years working as an official War Artist, Sutherland clearly experienced a powerful need to get back to his own work, and to pick up where he had left off. The several new versions he made of the lane entrance motif, including several large oils, are a case in point. All feature the centralised pocket of space, receding into depth, flanked by curved, rhythmically organised black shapes, and surmounted by passages evoking foliage. Lane Entrance (lot 78) is an especially ordered, symmetrical version of the idea, and formed the basis for a larger work on paper Entrance to Lane with Interlacing Foliage.
M.H.