Graham Sutherland, O.M.

Acquired directly from the artist by Dr Henry (Heinz) Roland
His Sale, Sotheby's London, 23^rd March 1983, lot 55, where acquired by Crane Kalman Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owners, May 1984

 

London, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, Colour, pure and atmospheric, May-June 1947, cat. no.17 (as Thorns);
Athens, British Institute, Modern British Paintings 1942 - 1947, October - November 1947, and touring to Rome, Galleria Palma, Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Marseille, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Prague, Exhibition Hall Svazceskeho;
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, April 1949 (exhibition details untraced);
York, City Art Gallery, Collection of Works by English and Foreign Modern Artists, March 1950, cat. no.50;
Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, Collection of Works by English and Foreign Modern Artists, April - May 1950, cat. no.31;
Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, Collection of Works by English and Foreign Modern Artists, June - July 1950, cat. no.50;
Brighton, Art Gallery, Collection of Works by English and Foreign Modern Artists, September 1950, cat. no.50;
London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Graham Sutherland: A retrospective selection, April - May 1951, cat. no.26;
Hampstead Artists' Council, Modern Painting and Sculpture of the British and Continental Schools, January - February 1952, cat. no.52;
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, Spring Exhibition, 1952;
Southampton Art Gallery, Modern Painting and Sculpture of the British and Continental Schools, November - December 1952, cat. no.51;
Hampstead Artists' Council, Artists at work from sketch to finish, May - June 1953;
Southport, Atkinson Art Gallery, on loan, May - September 1954;
Edinburgh, Diploma Galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy, Ten English Painters, January - February 1956, cat. no.71;
Frankfurt, Frankfurter Kunstkabinett, Graham Sutherland, April - May 1957, cat. no.23;
Bristol, City Art Gallery, Contemporary Paintings, June - August 1960;
Manchester, City Art Gallery, Heinz Roland Collection, June - August 1962;
Leeds, City Art Gallery, Heinz Roland Collection, August - October 1962, cat. no.111;
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Graham Sutherland Retrospective, March - May 1967;
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Graham Sutherland Retrospective, June - July 1967;
Berlin, Haus am Waldsee, Graham Sutherland Retrospective, August - September 1967;
Cologne, Wallraf Richartz Museum, Graham Sutherland Retrospective, October - November 1967;
Bristol, City Art Gallery, Forty Works from the Collection of Dr. H. M. Roland, February - March 1969, cat. no.37;
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Dekade 40, November 1972, cat. no.112; and touring to Southampton, City Art Gallery, Carlisle, Museum and Art Gallery, Durham, D.L.I. Museum and Arts Centre, Manchester, City Art Gallery, Bradford, City Art Gallery and Aberdeen, Museum and Art Gallery;
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, Forty Pictures from the Roland Collection, April 1974, cat. no.37;
Farnham, West Surrey College of Art and Design, November - December 1975, cat. no.19;
London, Camden Arts Centre, The Roland Collection, September - October 1976, cat. no.134;
Edinburgh, Scottish Arts Council, Eighty Works from the Roland Collection, November - December 1976, cat. no.31; and touring to London, Courtauld Institute Gallery, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, York, City Art Gallery, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum;
Milton Keynes, Central Art Gallery, Works from the Roland Collection, March - December 1979, cat. no.49; and touring to Plymouth, City Museum and Art Gallery, Jarrow, Bede Gallery, Newcastle, Polytechnic Art Gallery, Bury, St. Edmunds Art Gallery;
Guildford, University of Surrey, Sixty Works from the Roland Collection, April 1980 - May 1981, cat. no.55; and touring to London, Arts Centre of the University of London;
London, Tate Gallery, Graham Sutherland, May - July 1982, cat. no.133;
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Twentieth Century British and European Paintings and Sculpture, December 1983 - January 1984;
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, One Man's Choice, 4^th April - 19^th May 1985, cat. no.106;
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Graham Sutherland, April - June 1999;
London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, June – September 2005, cat. no.78, illustrated in the catalogue pp.37 & 159.

 

Art News, New York, October 1950, p.23;
Robert Melville, Graham Sutherland, Ambassador Editions, London 1950, illustrated pl.17;
Eric Newton, 'Style and Vision in Art', The Listener, 11^th April 1957, p.594;
Douglas Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, Lund Humphries, London, 1961, cat. and pl. no.83c (erroneously dated to 1946);
Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2005, illustrated p.121, pl.46.

The canvas undulates across the surface but is in good overall condition. There are a few specks of surface matter, a few lines of craquelure and some slight areas of paint separation in places but the paint surface is otherwise in good original condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a simple rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Thorn Head, 1947 is perhaps one of the most important examples of Sutherland's art ever to come to auction. Dating to a crucial period of his work, it is both a distillation of the themes and concerns in his work during the late 1930s and the war years, and a prefiguration of much that was to come.

Relating to the commission from Rev. Walter Hussey for a painting of the Crucifixion for St.Matthew's, Northampton, the group of paintings to which Thorn Head, 1947 belongs demonstrate how Sutherland's working methods often spawned entirely different strands of imagery from the original concept. The Crucifixion subject was Sutherland's own suggestion, Hussey having initially proposed The Agony in the Garden as a theme and this choice of subject may therefore be entwined with Sutherland's friendship and working relationship with Francis Bacon. Whilst at this time Sutherland's prominence and reputation was far ahead of that of Bacon, recent study has shown that the two artists were both clearly working on similar themes and in a number of cases, the influence of the younger Bacon on Sutherland may have been considerable. It appears that as the war came to an end, Sutherland's attempts to pick up the strands of his pre-war work caused him some difficulty and indecision, and it was to actually take him more than two and a half years to produce the final painting for St.Matthew's (fig. 2).

Bacon had shown, to no little acclaim, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate Collection London) alongside Sutherland's work at a group exhibition in April 1945, and the brutal imagery of this and other paintings of the period, especially Painting, 1946 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)  (fig. 3) do seem to have offered Sutherland some suggestions as to how one might take on a subject which he clearly felt, and especially in the aftermath of the war, to carry a huge resonance for the time. He had been particularly struck by the horrific accounts and newsreel footage that emerged from the concentration camps of Europe, and the final painting, unveiled in November 1946, seems to be an amalgam of these contemporary examples of inhumanity with that of the unforgettable Northern Renaissance masters, especially Grunewald, whose Isenheim altarpiece is a clear influence.

However, the anthropomorphism that had been a key feature of Sutherland's earlier paintings was also at work here, and alongside his work on the Crucifixion commission, he had embarked on a body of landscape-influenced paintings which were to draw very strongly on the imagery of the crown of thorns. As the artist explained in a note to Curt Valentin, the New York dealer, for the preface to his exhibition there in spring 1946,

I had been thinking of the Crucifixion...my mind became preoccupied with the idea of thorns (the crown of thorns) and wounds made by thorns.

Then on going into the country I began to notice thorn trees and bushes. Especially against the sky, the thorns on the branches established a limit of aerial space. They were like dividers pricking out points in space in all directions, encompassing the air, as it were solid and tangible. I'd never noticed this before: but all kinds of ideas for pictures started to come into my mind. (The artist, quoted from a letter dated 24^th January 1946, and published in Buchholz Gallery, Graham Sutherland, New York, February 1946)

The paintings that grew from these observations are at once images of natural forms and symbols of the horrors that had been experienced by so many during the war years. As Sutherland had communicated the destruction of buildings during the blitz by creating anthropomorphic creatures from the girders and debris that rose from the ruins, so contemporary observers noted that these paintings captured something that was clearly very much current in the post-war psyche, exhausted as it must have been by privation, atrocity, loss and suffering.

Whilst there is a clear link between a pre-war painting such as Gorse on Sea Wall (Collection Ulster Museum, Belfast) of 1939, and Thorn Head, 1947, in the present image we can see how observation of natural phenomena has transmogrified into an evocation of cruelty and threat. If one accepts this interpretation of images such as Thorn Head, 1947, and in view of the relationship with Bacon at this time where both artists were influenced (although Bacon seems to have been subsequently less generous in his acknowledgement of this) by the other, then it may be reasonable to posit that Bacon's series of paintings Head I - VI (see fig. 4), which were painted in 1948-9 and first exhibited as a group at the Hanover Gallery in 1949 were in some way both a response and a riposte to Sutherland's work and images such as the present painting.

Thorn Head, 1947 was originally acquired directly from the artist by the legendary art dealer Henry Roland, and formed part of his astonishingly wide-ranging and high-quality collection of twentieth century art. Extensively exhibited worldwide, this painting is an example of Sutherland at his very best.