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Lot Essay
Sutherland's work as a War Artist had enabled a 'steady progression in his landscape work which he continued after the war [and] he had also been privileged to see landscape from deep inside or with its counterpane of soil thrown back' (see M. Yorke, The Spirit of Place, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, p. 130).
This progression is visible in his landscapes of 1944, and John Hayes has identified the direction of Sutherland's work, visible in the present lot, writing, 'Line is thicker, more forceful and more dramatic; colour is brighter, more arbitrary, and more varied; natural forms are more generalized, even vestigial, little more than symbolic roads or fields or woods; shallow and flattened compositions, with a decorative emphasis on the picture plane, become more common ... The abstraction, the distortion, the angularity, as well as the decorative harmonies of line and colour, in these works, are closer to the visual world of modern French painting than they are to the romanticism of Sutherland's own style of the 1930s' (see J. Hayes, The Art of Graham Sutherland, Oxford, 1980, p. 27).
This progression is visible in his landscapes of 1944, and John Hayes has identified the direction of Sutherland's work, visible in the present lot, writing, 'Line is thicker, more forceful and more dramatic; colour is brighter, more arbitrary, and more varied; natural forms are more generalized, even vestigial, little more than symbolic roads or fields or woods; shallow and flattened compositions, with a decorative emphasis on the picture plane, become more common ... The abstraction, the distortion, the angularity, as well as the decorative harmonies of line and colour, in these works, are closer to the visual world of modern French painting than they are to the romanticism of Sutherland's own style of the 1930s' (see J. Hayes, The Art of Graham Sutherland, Oxford, 1980, p. 27).