Petra

Helen Sutherland was an important collector, and her patronage of artists was a major contribution to contemporary art in the 1930s. She provided invaluable support to Twentieth Century artists both in financial terms with loans, gifts and purchases - which she carefully portioned out so as to avoid the dependence of traditional 'patronage' - and in personal terms. Sutherland was an heiress whose father, Sir Thomas Sutherland, had been the chairman of P & O, a member of parliament and also one of the founders of HSBC. Despite this, most of Sutherland's wealth actually came from her mother's family: her father, the quintessential Victorian, decided that she had already inherited enough by the time he died and left most of his own wealth to charity. Sutherland, who had been married near the beginning of the Twentieth Century in a relationship that was not to last, had nonetheless been introduced to a sparkling society of intelligentsia. She visited Paris, where she frequented exhibitions and began to buy pictures by Courbet, several Persian miniatures, and works by Georges Seurat and André Derain. In 1925 she was introduced to Ben and Winifred Nicholson by her friend the painter Constance Lane, and began to buy works by them and by Paul Nash and Duncan Grant. Sutherland impressed Nicholson and his wife Winifred when they first stayed with her. As Winifred recalled, 'She had a cold bath every morning, walked every day to the source of the King Water about 20 miles, lived on nothing but apples, grapes, pineapple and a little lettuce' (Winifred Nicholson, quoted in S.J. Checkland, Ben Nicholson: The Vicious Circles of his Life and Art, London, 2000, p. 63).

In 1929 Sutherland leased Rock Hall, near Alnwick, though she made frequent visits to London. Rock Hall was beautifully decorated and hung with a growing collection of art works. Many guests stayed at Rock Hall, including the poet Elisabeth Jennings and David Jones, whom Sutherland met in 1929 through a fellow art lover, Jim Ede. Jones had almost equal eminence as a poet, having published his First World War epic In Parenthesis in 1937.

While living her own independent life, first at Rock Hall and later at Cockley Moor, Sutherland had begun to immerse herself in the world of beauty. Initially she had focussed on disparate older objects including works by Courbet and Maillol, but soon came to be fascinated by living artists with whom she could have contact.