'Artist in Focus: Graham Sutherland’ includes paintings, drawings and prints by the twentieth-century British artist Graham Sutherland alongside items from the artist’s archive including letters, photographs, studio materials and found objects. It shows both the breadth of material in the Sutherland collection and archive held by the Museum, and suggests connections between objects and art and between the people and places that shaped Sutherland’s career.

Sutherland was celebrated as the ‘outstanding painter of his generation’. Initially inspired by the English Romantic tradition, he developed a personal approach to nature which increasingly drew on modern European art. The places in which Sutherland worked had a profound influence on his work: from the rural landscape of Kent to the hills and valleys of west Wales and the heat and light of the French Riviera.

The exhibition has been curated by Rachel Flynn, an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award student co-supervised by Professor Liz Prettejohn and Dr Grace Brockington at the University of Bristol and Nick Thornton, Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Her research focuses on the Museum’s unique and extensive Sutherland collection and archive. Much of the material was first bequeathed to the Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle, established by the artist in 1976 and transferred to the Museum in Cardiff in 1995. Sutherland wanted to leave a collection to Wales because he felt ‘having gained so much from this country, I should like to give something back'.