Provenance:

Anonymous Sale; Sotheby’s, London, 18 July 1990, lot 282, where purchased by the late Peter and Olive Belton.
Christie’s London, South Kensington 2010
Private Collection

This dramatic, swirling landscape is a fantastic example Graham Sutherland’s increasingly brooding and skilful use of black. Sutherland was using it to heighten the impact of his flame-reds, oranges and yellows and Edward Sackville-West described Sutherland’s use of it as ‘a bass octave of ‘fuliginous obscurity’. Roger Berthoud, in his biography of the artist, described his use of colour in this time something of later Turner and of Palmer, or indeed of Matisse or Nolde, in his expressive use of colour. Yet it is all highly individual.

The landscape of Wales transformed Sutherland when he first visited in 1934, and he returned again and again throughout his life. ‘It was in this country that I began to learn painting’, Sutherland wrote in a famous letter to Colin Anderson. In the August of 1940, Kathleen and he went for a holiday in Pembrokeshire, where they found their base in Wales for the next few years Lleithyr Farm, near Whitesand Bay and also he was working in Wales for the War Artist Advisory Committee. Roger Berthoud describes Pembrokeshire’s medley of tightly packed hills, valleys, cliffs, estuaries and moorland, the land visibly shaped by the powerful rock movements and inundations of the sea over millions of years. Its impact was also a matter of timing. Graham had (belatedly) become increasingly conscious of the work of Picasso, Matisse, Miro and other Paris based artist, through the magazines Cahires d’Art and Minataure. He was looking for a way of using what he had learnt without abandoning his individuality. In the contours and details of the landscape, he found it.

Cliff Road captures the mood - of darkness and light – of decay and life, with strange arabesques formed by the sea eroded rocks. It may represent the landscape in Cumbria, near their cottage at Solva where there were some ‘jolly steep cliffs’ A vast congregation of rocks....they obscure the earth and sky with their forms...many of them rise, like unmentionable bathers, from pools of water. Supporting on their backs small rocks like slothful heads, they bend forward casting their huge shadows into the depths which half obscure their bulk. It may also relate to the work Cliff Road illustrated in D. Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, London London, 1961, p. 119, no. 29, Felton Bequest, Melbourne Art Gallery, Australia.

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