As the painter himself loved to say, one finds oneself faced with emotional paraphrases of reality.”

After a debut influenced by the engravings of Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland began painting the “intellectual and emotional essence”¹ of the Pembrokeshire coast on canvas when he was around thirty years old. In 1934, these intense landscapes attracted the attention of Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery in London. Six years later, he appointed Sutherland as a war artist alongside Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. However, Sutherland’s mature style stood out for its plant-based subjects, vineyards and machinery, and portraits of the wealthy European middle classes that he executed after the war. In 1952, at the age of forty-nine, the collection of works he presented in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the prize awarded to him by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in Brazil made him an international name. As well as his early success, Sutherland also stands out for the consistency of his career that spanned more than half a century. All his works are characterised by their organic dimension, their introspection and their allusive forms. Whether engravings or naturalistic views of trees, bombed buildings in the East End of London or tin mines in Cornwall, Mediterranean gardens or imaginary bestiaries, portraits or religious episodes painted on commission, his works invite the viewer to question different aspects and meanings, offering an ongoing array of unexpected details to be discovered. As the painter himself loved to say, one finds oneself faced with emotional paraphrases of reality.”² 

In summer 1960, during one of his habitual visits to Venice, Sutherland met Renato Guttuso and swapped a drawing with him. Dated “Venice 16-6-60”, Guttuso’s nude lying on the ground anticipated the subjects exhibited in his personal room at the 30th Biennale. Dedicated to his Italian “ami”, the sheet signed by Sutherland instead featured his first known idea for Crouching Figure II (fig. 1): an animal sitting on its haunches translated four years later on to a canvas from the Parisian firm Lucien Lefebvre-Foinet. In all probability the artist worked on it from autumn 1963 at Villa Blanche, a home he had purchased in 1955, just a few miles from Menton. In fact, the background with laurel leaves recalls the hedge from the portrait of Konrad Adenauer: a tribute to his beloved garden at Villa Collina in Cadenabbia on Lake Como, where his sitter had posed for him in early September. In keeping with a practice that was not unusual for Sutherland, an identical image also features in the Fontaine (Fountain) cycle painted between 1963 and 1965. The pose of such an ambiguous animal - seemingly a perching bird - could instead derive from the sphinxes he admired at the British Museum or from the Greek lions at the entrance to the Venetian Arsenal, recorded in his sketchbook.³ At the same time, it could also be considered a reformulation of the cynocephali (a kind of dog-faced baboon venerated by ancient Egyptians) of the early 1950s, which were later included in his lithographs of the Bestiary (1967-68). 

However, the comparison with other paintings from the period is more apt: The Captive (1963-64) and Seated Animal (1965, fig. 2). In the rai documentary Lo specchio e il miraggio (The Mirror and the Mirage),⁴ Sutherland attributed both to the allure of the lions in perspective on the façade of the Scuola di San Marco. Just like them, Crouching Figure II is emblematic of inescapable human solitude. 

Together with Seated Animal, Cerruti’s work marks the start of a new course in his painting: with freer gestures, daring colour combinations and a dramatic existential charge. 

Absent from the 1965 retrospective at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, Crouching Figure II was seen for the first time at the collective English Eye Exhibition at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York in 1965. The painting arrived in Turin in the early 1970s, gaining attention in 1973, when Francesco Arcangeli included it in the Fratelli Fabbri monograph and the Galleria Gissi featured it in the end-ofyear review. This may have been when Crouching Figure II entered the Cerruti Collection. 

Chiara Perin 

¹ G. Sutherland, “Letter to Colin Anderson”, in Sutherland 1999, p. 46.

² G. Sutherland, “Thoughts on Painting”, in Sutherland 1999, p. 34.

³ Dated 1961-62, “Sketchbook 34” features drawings of the two lions on pages 10 and 110. It can now be consulted online on the Tate Gallery website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-812-34/sutherland-sketchbook-34.

⁴ Directed by his friend Pier Paolo Ruggerini with texts by Douglas Cooper and Franco Russoli, the documentary was broadcast on RAI1 on 4 September 1969. The dialogue with Cooper is translated in Conegliano 1996, pp. 253-255.