Graham Sutherland was a British painter, printmaker, and designer. He abandoned an apprenticeship as a railway engineer to study engraving and etching, 1921–6, and up to 1930 worked exclusively as a printmaker. His etchings of this period are in the Romantic and visionary tradition of Samuel Palmer. In the early 1930s he began experimenting with oils and by 1935 he had turned mainly to painting. His paintings of the 1930s show a highly subjective response to nature, inspired mainly by visits to Pembrokeshire. He had a vivid gift of visual metaphor and his landscapes are not topographical, but semi-abstract patterns of haunting and monstrous shapes rendered in his distinctively acidic colouring (Entrance to a Lane, 1939, Tate, London).

From 1940 to 1945 he was employed as an Official War Artist, mainly recording the effects of bombing; his poignant pictures of shattered buildings are among the most famous images of the home front. Soon after the war he took up religious painting, with a Crucifixion (1946) for St Matthew's, Northampton (he received the commission at the dedication of Henry Moore's Madonna and Child in this church), and also portraiture, with Somerset Maugham (1949, Tate). It was in these two fields that he chiefly made his mark in his later career. Sutherland's most celebrated work, however, has become widely popular—it is the immense tapestry of Christ in Glory (completed 1962) in Coventry Cathedral. In addition to such figure subjects, Sutherland continued to paint landscapesand late in his career he returned to printmaking, producing coloured lithographs. Apart from paintings and prints, his work included ceramics and designing posters and stage costumes and decor. He received many honours, notably the Order of Merit in 1960. 

(c) The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)