Study of an Oak Tree
1975.
Watercolour, gouache and black ink on buff paper, squared for transfer. Signed with initials and dated 1973 and inscribed with title.
197 x 267 mm.
(7 4/5 x 10 1/2 inches).
Literature: William Boyd, 'Graham Sutherland', Modern British Masters Series, Vol. IX, Bernard Jacobson Ltd., London, 1993, Pl. 33.
London 1903 ~ 1980 London
Graham Sutherland studied at Goldsmith's College of Art, London, from 1921-1926. His artistic career began with print making and he produced small, poetic, densely worked etchings of rural England, thatched cottages and stooks of corn influenced by the early etchings of Samuel Palmer.1
He did not start painting seriously until 1934 when he went to Pembrokeshire, South Wales, for the first time. The bareness of this landscape was a revelation to him and a source of repeated inspiration. He was fascinated by trees and their root forms as well as fragments of thorn bushes; all of which demonstrated the principles of organic growth. He would isolate them from their surroundings and present them close up, sometimes in violent foreshortening. This way they became mysterious and threatening 'presences'. They took on a metamorphic character, with suggestions of animal or human forms, and their dramatic impact was further enhanced by rich, emotive colour.
During the Second World War Sutherland was employed as an Official War Artist to record, mainly in drawings, the bomb damage in London and South Wales. In 1947 Sutherland visited the South of France for the first time and from then on spent part of each year there. Twenty years later he returned to Pembrokeshire and still found the same special magic in the landscape. Consequently, almost all his nature paintings from then on were based once again on Pembrokeshire themes, such as the extraordinary twisted oaks along the banks of the River Cleddau at Picton. Our watercolour, with its vivid green colour, shows an old, gnarled branch of a tree which is almost uncanny in its relationship to the breasts of a mammal.
1. Colin Harrison, 'The Artistic Rediscovery of Samuel Palmer' in Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881, Vision and Landscape exh. cat. British Museum, London, 2005, p.57, Fig. 20.
