Cathedral Rocks, Pembrokeshire

This watercolour, together with its companion piece lot 345, dates from Sutherland’s second Pembrokeshire period, when he returned to the inspiration of Wales after many years of self-imposed continental exile. Some words that Keith Vaughan wrote about Sutherland’s work in New Writing and Daylight (1944) ring true in these compositions: ‘Stones and earth and roots are the motifs of Sutherland’s paintings, the most primitive and durable of all the natural elements. They grow in his paintings as they grow in nature, according to their inherent principles of structure, no longer as they appear in the visual scene.’ For Vaughan, Sutherland had adopted a non-scenic approach to landscape painting, dispensing with the tradition of the horizon and the perspectival systems associated with it, and concentrating instead on the substance of nature, its weight and growth.

A.L.