Sutherland (Graham Vivian)

1931.
Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) studied etching under Frederick Griggs, working in an accomplished style in the pastoral tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. This formed the basis of his early commercial success in the 1920s, selling to both British and American buyers, until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 significantly disrupted the market. However, as this event cast a long shadow over the world, so Sutherland’s work took on a darker, more brooding air, and echoes of the more surreal forms of De Chirico and Nash that paved the way for his later work. This scene, based on the garden of Sutherland’s home at the White House, in Farningham, Kent, dates to 1931 when this phase was in its prime. Sutherland depicts a rosebush, ferns and shrubs in delicate, spiralling, foliate lines in vignette over the strongly contrasted light and dark, solid geometrical forms of walls and outhouses,.