SP 4582
GRAHAM SUTHERLAND, OM
1903- London - 1980
The lamp
Signed, dated 1944 and inscribed with the title on the reverse
Canvas: 25 x 24 in / 63.5 x 61 cm
Framed size: 34 3/8 x 33 ¼ in / 87.3 x 84.5 cm
Provenance:
Buchholz Gallery, New York
Andrew C. Ritchie, New Haven, Connecticut
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Marlborough Galleria d’Art, Rome
Private Collection
Exhibited:
New York, Buchholz Gallery, Graham Sutherland, February – March 1946, no. 6, illustrated
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Graham Sutherland; 1967, no. 100, illustrated; then travelled to Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Selected European Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Summer 1973, no. 77, illustrated in colour p. 153
Literature:
Robert Melville, Graham Sutherland, London, 1950, illustrated, no. 5
Douglas Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, Lund Humphries, London, 1961, no. 61d, illustrated
John Hayes, Graham Sutherland, Phaidon, Oxford, 1980, no. 60, p. 27, illustrated p.97
Ronald Alley, Graham Sutherland, ex. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1982, p. 105
Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland, A Biography, Faber and Faber, London, 1982, pp. 115, 119, 123-4
Sutherland painted two versions of this unusual subject, seen from opposite viewpoints in 1944. The extraordinary works were inspired by a lamp in the artist’s room while staying at a cottage at Sandy Haven, Pembrokeshire. Roger Berthoud, in his biography of the artist recounts that it was during August of that year that Graham and his wife went to Pembrokeshire ‘for further material, staying first at the Mariner’s Arms in Haverfordwest with John Craxton and Lucian Freud, then retreating from their high spirits to a cottage at Sandy Haven…Here too he conceived two ravishing oils called The Lamp, based on a paraffin lamp in the Sandy Haven cottage. By now – as The Lamp almost proclaims – peace was in prospect at last. In June Normandy was invaded, and on 25 August Paris was liberated’ (R. Berthoud, Graham Sutherland, A Biography, Faber and Faber, London, 1982, p. 114-5).
John Hayes also suggests these striking depictions of a bold, glowing light surrounded by the greenery of indoor plants, are images of ‘peace and repose’ painted at a time when the war seemed almost won. Sutherland was one of several painters commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to record the devastation of the London Blitz, tin mines and steel works from 1940-5 which took him to various bombed-out areas of Britain (and at the end of 1944 on his first trip abroad to France), leaving little time for the development of his own work. Feeding a Steel Furnace, 1941-2 (Tate Britain) is a characteristic example of Sutherland’s commissioned work during the war, in which the flicker of a yellow flame writhes in the pitch black darkness, the fiery industrial landscape a potent allegory of hell. Painted two years later, The Lamp reverses the juxtaposition of light and dark (light emanating rather than encroached upon), the bright, acidic yellow becoming the leading note of the picture. The positivity and reassuring warmth of the unusually bright palette, which includes orange/yellow, red and green, is reinforced by the picture’s clear, boldly defined structure, the Victorian lamp a seemingly indestructible beacon. The painting also reverses Sutherland’s war-time theme of man’s destruction of nature representing a distinctly more harmonious union. The lamp appears to be growing from or intricately connected to the bold, curvilinear stems of a nearby plant. Indeed the flame itself resembles a flower bud or bulb more than flickering fire.
This extraordinary image not only documents the end of Sutherland’s work as a war artist, but also the beginning of a new stylistic phase of brighter colours and bolder, simplified forms. Critics and art historians subsequently associated this change with the artist’s move to a Mediterrean climate. However Sutherland himself contradicted this idea stating, ‘I think I made a major step forward…three years before I started going to France regularly. Even before I went abroad, I owed a profound debt to both Picasso and Matisse…Critics have said that my colour became light (and acid!) after I started to work in France!...if they had bothered to enquire, I could have shown them pictures painted in 1944 which were very bright and light in colour…When I did start working in France, in 1947, I must confess that I did wonder how I had come to anticipate, by this lightening of key, the clarity of the steady southern light’ (cited in J. Hayes, Graham Sutherland, Phaidon, Oxford, 1980, p27).
Bearing in mind its importance, it is hardly surprising that Sutherland chose to exhibit this work two years later at his first one-man show at the Buchholz Gallery, New York in 1946, which marked the beginning of his international reputation.
GRAHAM SUTHERLAND, OM
1903- London - 1980
Born into a middle-class family in London 1903, Graham Sutherland was an accomplished painter, printmaker and portraitist. Although Sutherland originally prepared for a career in engineering, studying at Epsom College, Sutton, after a short period as a trainee engineer at Midland Railway, he studied at Goldsmith College of Art, specializing in etching. His first one-man exhibition was in 1925 and he was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in the same year. As a response to the diminishing demand for prints, Sutherland began to paint with oil and watercolours c1930 and continued to experiment with the medium in the form of romantic landscapes following a trip to Pembrokeshire in 1934. Sutherland was drawn to Pembrokeshire’s combination of marine and landscape environment, rich in historical overtones, and returned there every year until WWII. Sutherland consistently found its landscape an inspiration for his anthropomorphic natural forms.
From 1940-45 Sutherland worked as an official War Artist, drawing and painting armaments factories, blast furnaces and recording the devastation of shattered masonry and twisted iron inflicted on London during the blitz. He also painted mining and quarrying scenes in Wales and Cornwall.
The work of Graham Sutherland is represented at the Arts Council of Great Britain; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; British Museum; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Glasgow Art Gallery & Museum; Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Imperial War Museum; Marlborough Fine Art, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tate Gallery, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.