Graham Sutherland, O.M.

The present work appears to date to around 1939-40, and would thus belong to the group of empty and mysterious landscapes that abound with crepuscular moodiness. Drawing on the example of Samuel Palmer (cf. A Cornfield by Moonlight, 1826-32, British Museum Collection) Sutherland had produced a number of twilight or moonlight landscapes that seem to pulse with a barely disguised elemental force.

As such they more than fulfil the qualities identified in them by John Piper in his 1942 publication, British Romantic Artists:

‘Graham Sutherland paints the elements, and the more elemental natural forms…But these are the occasions rather than the subjects for his pictures. He is the most subjective of the younger painters, and has said that he wants his pictures to have ‘a certain strangeness’. To be absorbed by one of them is to know the meaning of Wordsworth’s

‘…Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees’
(John Piper, British Romantic Artists, London 1942, p.48)