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Lot Essay
The present work appears to be a study for Cliff Road (see D. Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, London, 1961, p. 119, no. 29, illustrated), Felton Bequest, Melbourne Art Gallery, Australia.
Sutherland was appointed an Official War artist in the same year as the present work was executed. His first commissions took him to the airfields in Wiltshire and then to bomb-damaged Swansea. In the Autumn he returned to Trottiscliffe.
D. Cooper states,'His early landscape paintings glow, they are instinct with vitality and are satisfying to look at. Nature takes on a strange, subtle and often fiery tonality, with Venetian and erythrine red, vermillion, pink, violet, Prussian and cervlian blue, alizarian green, veridian, yellow ochre, orange chrome and orange cardonium offset against greys, whites and heavy, but nevertheless almost luminous, passages of black' (ibid. p. 21).
Sutherland was appointed an Official War artist in the same year as the present work was executed. His first commissions took him to the airfields in Wiltshire and then to bomb-damaged Swansea. In the Autumn he returned to Trottiscliffe.
D. Cooper states,'His early landscape paintings glow, they are instinct with vitality and are satisfying to look at. Nature takes on a strange, subtle and often fiery tonality, with Venetian and erythrine red, vermillion, pink, violet, Prussian and cervlian blue, alizarian green, veridian, yellow ochre, orange chrome and orange cardonium offset against greys, whites and heavy, but nevertheless almost luminous, passages of black' (ibid. p. 21).