1903

Graham Sutherland is born in Streatham, south London on 24 August, the son of George Sutherland (a barrister and civil servant) and his wife Elsie Foster. His brother Humphrey is born in 1908. His sister Vivian is born in 1913.

1917-1919

He is a pupil at Epsom College.

'I was bullied at school, of course. There was a great deal of bullying. I think boys at school don't like timidity. I must have been timid, really. They like to take it out on someone they think is weaker.'

1919-1920

After schooling he is apprenticed at the Midland Railway works in Derby. He is not proficient in maths and wishes to study art.

'I got shut into the boiler of a shunting engine…I couldn't get out …They had to take the dome off. …I think that is how claustrophobia started with me. There was a time when it was aggravated by agoraphobia. For instance to cross a street was agony. I never had had agoraphobia in the country, only when there were milling crowds crossing the road or something.'

1922-1928

He is a student at Goldsmith's School of Art learning to be a fine art printer. He is influenced by the work of Samuel Palmer, other English Romantics and Rembrandt.
He meets sixteen year old Kathleen (also Kathy) Barry an Irish Catholic of outstanding beauty, studying fashion drawing.

'As we became familiar with Palmer's later etchings, we "bit" our plates deeper. We had always been warned against "over-biting". But we did over "over-bite" and we "burnished" our way through innumerable "states" quite unrepentant at the way we punished and maltreated the copper…It seemed to me wonderful that a strong emotion, such as was Palmer's, could change and transform the appearance of things. I know that this obsession was a young man's passion, an adolescent flame, which was bound to end in one's "first death". Nevertheless the idea of the way emotion can change appearances has never left me.'

1926

After instruction he is received into the Roman Catholic church.

It seems clear to me that there are various kinds of artists who, whether believers or not, have produced or could produce what could be called religious art both today and in the past. It is claimed for Matisse, for instance, that he was not a Christian. Yet he was drawn to work at Vence. Slight though this is, it is imbued nevertheless with a certain religious feeling, as I believe are most of his very late works. But I am also thinking of others: Picasso, Goya and Rembrandt, for instance. These artists come to mind because deeply rooted in them is a genius for expression, a largeness of spirit, great perspicacity and curiosity, to say nothing of technical invention and a passion close to the sentiment which could be called, properly I think, religious.'

1927

Graham Sutherland is married to Kathleen Barry on 29 December.

'A painter must be part of his landscape to find the best in it. As the ground reflects sky, and sea reflects land, each appearing to be part of the other, so must the painter learn to recognise himself, as it were, both materially and spiritually in the landscape and the landscape in himself.

1928-1932

He teaches engraving at the Chelsea School of Art.

'It is our wont, nowadays, in attempting to discuss the nature of things, to make categories. This, however, is often an imperfect method of identification, and particularly so when we attempt to discuss the nature of art: for the very qualities which we regard as being especially characteristic of a particular type of art are, in fact, elusive, and may be found to be a constituent in another type of art.'

1929

John Vivian Sutherland is born on 16 April. He dies on 14 July. He is their only child.

'During these terrible months I found I didn't enquire as to the future at all.'
'The heart cannot express all it feels direct. One must speak, as one can, through paint and through images. One's feelings carry one where they will.

1930

The etching, Pastoral is recognised as his first work of genius.

'Out of the thousand things I see - one juxtaposition of forms - above all others seems to have a meaning. I don't always understand what I am doing - or what I am likely to do. You might say that at this stage I am hemmed in and compressed - even thwarted.'

1930's

The economic turmoil destroys the demand for prints. Sutherland teaches, illustrates and designs textiles, ceramics and glass. He paints in watercolour, gouache and oil.

'Right from the beginning I was interested in certain correspondences. I use the word in the same sense as Baudelaire, meaning the correspondence between machines and organic forms, between organic forms and people, and of people with stones. Before about 1950 this was more or less unconscious in my art.'

1934

The Sutherlands are in Pembrokeshire.

'After I had been to Wales I began to notice in landscape that almost everything, if one keeps one's eyes open, is potential material for painting; and, more than that, certain elements of nature seem to me to have a kind of presence…shadows had a presence; certain conformation of rock seemed to go beyond being a rock, they were some kind of personality.'

1940 -1945

Sutherland is an official war artist. Where he goes he is accompanied by Kathy.

'I was arrested several times, especially in the East End! And once there I would look around. I will never forget those first extraordinary encounters: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and again a thin tinkle of falling glass - a noise that reminded me of the music of Debussy.'
'I would start to make perfunctory drawings here and there; gradually it was borne on me amid all this destruction how singularly one shape would impinge on another. A lift shaft, for instance, the only thing left from an obviously tall building…with a very strong lateral fall, suggested a wounded tiger in a paintings by Delacroix.'

1946

He paints the Crucifixion for St Matthew's Church, Northampton.

'The Crucifixion idea interested me because it has a duality which has always fascinated me. It is the most tragic of all themes, yet inherent in it is the promise of salvation. It is the symbol of the precarious moment, the hair's breadth between black and white. It is that moment when the sky seems superbly blue - and when one feels it is only blue in that superb way because at any moment it could be black - there is the other side of the mirror - and on that point one may fall into great gloom or rise to great happiness.'

1947

Their first visit to the south of France. Enchanted by the landscape and the way of life the visit was the first of many, until in 1955 they acquired the Villa Blanche near Menton which became their primary home.

'In my earlier work I used colour very sparingly: often blacks and greys and one colour. Then my colour began to lighten in key and I used quite a variety of colours. Critics have said that my colour became light (and acid!) after I started to work in France! It is a prime example of the laziness of some of them: if they had bothered to enquire I could have shown them pictures painted in 1944 which were very bright and light in colour. When I did start working in France in 1947, I must confess I did wonder how I had come to anticipate, by this lightening of key, the clarity of the steady southern light. Colour has two major functions. It is form and mood. That is to say by its warmth or coldness it can create form; it can also create a mood; it is fascinating to make complete changes of colour in the background of a painting and see how the whole atmosphere changes. Colour can suggest depth and shallowness, heat and cold - it can even suggest sound.'

1952

He is commissioned to design a tapestry for Coventry Cathedral. Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph is completed in 1962, in size within twenty-three by twelve metres.

'I felt that it must contain, together with the humanity of Christ, a sense of the power of Christ, in so far as Christ is also God. I did not want a Jehovah by any means, but on the other hand I wanted the look of the figure at least to have in its lineaments something of the power of lightening and thunder, of rocks, of the mystery of creation generally - a being who could have caused these things, not just a specially wise human figure…I needed something different, the same and yet not the same.

1954

He is commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to paint the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill to mark his eightieth birthday. Sir Winston describes the portrait as:

'a striking example of modern art. It certainly combines force and candour.'

'How will you paint me, as a cherub or a bulldog?'

'He showed me a bulldog so I painted a bulldog.'

The portrait was destroyed by Lady Churchill.

1960

He is awarded the Order of Merit.

1967

Sutherland is in Pembrokeshire for the first time in over twenty years at the suggestion of his friend the Italian film director Pier Paulo Ruggerini.

'It is extraordinary, the light here is as intense as in the south of France.'
'By using a new way of thinking - the poetic way of thinking - truth is expressed in an almost miraculous way. Aeschylus creates a new world in which 'grief bites' - 'rumour streams into the house' - 'smoke is the flickering sister of flame'. He speaks too of  'scarlet music, - 'sour notes' - 'loud perfume' and so on. These are metaphors which make the amorphous and concrete more clear, filled with greater significance…This condensing imagery is at the root of all poetry and painting. It creates a new world out of the same world.'

1976

The Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton is inaugurated (closed 1995) to house the gift by Graham and Kathleen Sutherland to the people of Pembrokeshire of more than a hundred oils, works on paper and prints.

'…Having gained so much from this country, I should like to give something back.'

'I am going through the Welsh items that are in the bank, and also my Welsh studies in France. These - even if they amounted to one hundred works (mostly small) would have to be supplemented with at least six or ten important oils, and I think that for the future I shall do a 'version' of every Welsh-inspired subject.'

1980

Graham Sutherland dies in London on 17 February.

'Kathleen and I could never bear to be separated: neither could I contemplate leaving her alone…'

'The mysteries of the boundaries of objects: an object lying on the grass in the sunlight, casting its shadow. The eye becomes a shuttle and drives the woof of the one between the weft of the other so that they become inextricable; and yet again they move and become one and the other.'

1991

Kathleen Sutherland dies in Italy on 29 May 1991.

In 1974 the artist said: 'My wife joins me in my thanks - and when one thinks of the encouragement so freely given by her - the patience and forebearance in the face of 'black' moods, inevitable with a painter, you will understand, I am sure, the pleasure you have given me is as much hers as mine.'

Angus Stewart