The Etchings of Graham Sutherland

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 Graham Sutherland – Number Fourty-Nine, 1924

Rather like my post on Graham Clarke, where I complained of his etchings and promoted his linocuts, in this post I would sooner promote and have a Sutherland etching than any of his other works.

I don’t know why I dislike so many of his paintings and to my opinion he only got worse with time. His work before WW2 seemed to have the sinister lust for mocking everything into destruction. It is almost as if he was calling for the war and then to use it as source material afterwards.

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 Frederick Landseer Griggs – Southwell Minster, 1916

Sutherland was apprenticed as an engineer before studying engraving at Goldsmiths College in London. His tutor was F. L. Griggs, who had been working as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of books. These publications bought to light the modern ability to travel by bus, car or train around the country. Griggs pen drawings for these books, I would say, were the point when romantic nostalgia came back into fashion and his students would have been exposed to this.

‘He had a palm as delicate as gossamer,’ Sutherland remembered, it was his drawn illustrations to the thirteen volumes of the Highways and Byways guidebooks which had inspired both Piper and Sutherland as boys. When the older man offered both friendship and technical advice Sutherland was flattered to receive it. He and Paul Drury spent the Christmas of 1926 with Griggs learning about inking plates and printing them. Above all he helped to augment their growing enthusiasm for Palmer. 

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 Samuel Palmer – Landscape, Girl Standing, 1826

In autumn 1924 William Larkins showed his friends a Palmer print The Herdsman’s Cottage, which he had bought in Charing Cross Road. This tiny work came as a revelation to them all. Sutherland recalled: I remember I was amazed by its completeness, both emotional and technical. It was unheard of at the school to cover the plate almost completely with work and quite new to us that the complex variety and multiplicity of lines could form a tone of such luminosity. 

The landscapes were daring and drawn from unexpected viewpoints: The Girl in the Ploughed Field astonished me with its total disregard for conventional composition. The drawing is almost what we today call naïf. 

So, as noted, the biggest change in style for Sutherland at this time from the teaching of Griggs into the engraving style of Palmer works would be to etching the sky. The image Number Fourty-Nine above from 1924 has a clean sky where as the images below have engraving all over the etching-plate.

In the 1920s, when photographs were being used as illustrations, the question of art was in doubt; why should an artist depict a scene when the camera can do the job for them? So the result was that an artist can bend reality. From this came an ideal eden like view of the past and a retelling of rural life before the invention of machines. Later on the art world would rebel against the camera and surrealist, cubist and impressionist styles would be invented.

The 1920s was the start of a revival for Palmer, unpublished plates were being printed, the Medici Society published his other works for the public and books were being scribed.

Other artists worth noting are Robin Tanner or Paul Drury, both new converts to the church of Samuel Palmer’s work. These men walked the first steps in the world of the New Romantics, coming out of Goldsmiths College at that time.

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 Paul Drury – September, 1928

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 Robin Tanner – The Road Mender, 1928

All men at the same time made an impact on the artworld and they all shared themes, knowingly or not. Below are the etchings of Sutherland.

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 Graham Sutherland – Wood Interior, 1929

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 Graham Sutherland – Cray Fields, 1925

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 Graham Sutherland – Pecken Wood, 1925

I thought it worth including this study by Sutherland of a print. Looking more like a mono-print it has all the qualities of Palmer’s work as it is done in ink and oil paint. The final etching is below.

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 Graham Sutherland – Sketch for Pastoral, 1930

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 Graham Sutherland – Pastoral, 1930

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 Graham Sutherland – Oast House, 1932

These words would get translated in various styles into Sutherland’s work but one of the most restrained and pleasing was this Shell Poster.

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 Graham Sutherland – Shell Poster – Oust Houses, Near Leeds, Kent, 1932

† The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times, 2001, p108
Stuart Sillars  – British Romantic Art and the Second World War, 1991, p42

John Reginald Brunsdon ARCA

John Reginald Brunsdon ARCA

John Brunsdon (1933-2014) studied at the Royal College of Art from 1955 to 1958. He was head of the printmaking department at St.Albans College of Art for sixteen years and later lived near Diss on the Suffolk/Norfolk border where he had his own print workshop.

Landscape was always John’s foremost influence, even when images were still abstract and influenced by American abstract expressionists such as Kline and Motherwell. He was fascinated by man’s mark on the landscape – the contrast between buildings and countryside: the one temporary the other timeless and primeval.

All of John’s work is individually hand etched, inked, coloured and printed. He took delight in the texture and decorative qualities of etched marks and the sweeping shapes of broad colour which fuse into timeless images.

He exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Canada, as well as participating in many one-man shows and group exhibitions in the UK. His work is represented in many major public collections, including the Tate Gallery, the British Council, Scottish Museum of Modern Art, the V & A, The Arts Council, the Museum of Modern Art New York. Brunsdon is widely considered one of Britain’s most distinguished printmakers.

Cantab

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 Cantab by Bretherton / Bunbury. Image from the British Museum collection.

Yesterday I bought an etching. Printed in 1772 by James Bretherton after the drawing by Henry William Bunbury. It’s shows a man, likely a priest, travelling by the river. The church in the background is Chesterton church (back then it was surrounded by fields) and the path there left the river toward the town.

His direction confused me for a short while until I remembered there were no bridges on the lower end of the Cam, only ferrymen. The sign to the left shows, he was heading To Cambridge, so not yet there, hence Chesterton. 

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 Detail of Cantab by Bretherton / Bunbury. 

Although many of the prints published by Bunbury were satires, I am unsure of the joke; it may just show the wealth of the clergy in the time of George III and the purpous of the dogs in the bottom left to be the poor. Even without the comedy it’s a beautiful picture in it’s original frame and glass.