The Bow

Painted in the Spring of 1962, The Bow represents the apotheosis of Graham Sutherland’s career. Its synthesis of themes most characteristic of the 1950s with a new and particularly optimistic palette evidently caught the eye of its previous owner, Sir Elton John. As seen here, the earthy greens and browns that pervaded Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes give way to a more vibrant palette. A new warmth and light entered his work following a trip to the South of France in 1947 with his close friend, Francis Bacon. The pair shared a mutual appreciation for one another’s work and this trip proved to be a seminal moment in Sutherland’s career. Commenting on the consequent shift in his palette Sutherland stated, ‘Colour has two major functions. It is form and mood. That is to say that 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, hot and cold – it can even suggest sound’.

The Bow can be considered as the culmination of the flurry of inspiration Sutherland experienced during the 1950s, a key decade for the artist. In 1952 Sutherland was honoured with three rooms in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which subsequently toured to major museums in Paris, Amsterdam and Zurich. In the same year, he also exhibited at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. He spent much of the decade working on his important commission for The Crucifixion at Coventry Cathedral, as well as taking on an increasing number of portrait commissions, including famous sitters, such as Somerset Maugham, Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook. In 1955, Sutherland bought Villa Tempe a Païa in Menton, France, a modernist home designed and built by the Irish architect Eileen Gray in 1934. This decision proved pivotal for Sutherland’s work, as he became increasingly influenced by the surrounding landscape in the ensuing years. In Sutherland’s paintings from the early 1950s, his bold use of colour was a revelation, and the colour was used to anchor the background to his series of commanding paintings for the Origins of the Land and Thorn Heads.

Looking to the present work, the powerful vertical and horizontal forms of the composition punctuate the canvas with a momentous thrust from the left side. Influences of the crucifixion, the standing forms, and abstracted mechanical elements are all present. The bow itself is given a sense of life, through the curved skeletal verticals that also resemble crustacea, and the centre with an eye and beak, giving a pre-historic bird-like quality to the image. Yet, the painting has an incredible positive energy. There’s a sense of rapid movement, not only in the imagery itself, but in Sutherland’s handling and brushwork in the bright azure and turquoise background, lifting the atmosphere as it transports the viewer immediately to the colours of the sea he experienced in the South of France. The subtle touch of red at the very top and simple outline at the bottom, defining a plant and fence anchors the whole composition.

The first owner of The Bow was Douglas Cooper, the pre-eminent art historian, critic and collector of modern art who also wrote the important early monograph on the artist published in 1961, The Works of Graham Sutherland. The Bow was subsequently purchased from him by Sir Elton John at the 1976 exhibition of Cooper’s collection of the artist’s work. The work has been in the same private collection for the last 39 years and comes to auction for the first time, presenting a rare opportunity to acquire a striking example of Sutherland’s work with such a rich history.