Orchard at Trottiscliffe
Orchard at Trottiscliffe
- landscape
- trees, landscape
- 20th century European
- European
- English
- British
These three works were done during the years when Sutherland was serving as a war artist. Of
Orchard at Trottiscliffe, he writes: 1"It was, I suspect, done in brief moments off from my war
artist activities, which lasted from 1941/42 to the end of the war. I was back in Trottiscliffe
in 1942 and the drawing was made in our garden there." However, rather than reflecting his
wartime experiences, they belong to a sequence of nature studies beginning in the l930's. Relevant
to these studies are his observations in an interview in 1969:2" •.. all my paintings are based on a
sudden and personal meeting with some part of nature. If these forms are filled with a sense of
threatening life, this is because the matter which started me off may have been invested with this.
I think they have no relation at all with my experience as a war painter; on the contrary, I think
the paintings I made as a war painter were influenced by the vocabulary of forms, which I observed
in natural objects."
An evolving view of nature is evident in our three drawings. The earliest, Orchard at Trottiscliffe
of 1943, continues Sutherland's former preoccupation with organic structure. The two later
drawings, dated 1944 and 1946, show new tendencies, which were to come to full realization by
1947-8 and to continue through the l950's. Specifically the colors are lighter, even decorative,
and there is an increased effect of flat planes laid on the surface from bottom to top . Perhaps
also the appearance of man and his imprint on nature in Triple-Tiered Landscape indicates
a new interest in symbolizing human activities as part of nature. It appears to fulfill Sutherland's
admiration for the Welsh landscape in 1942:3 "The astonishing fertility of these valleys and the
complexity of the roads running through them is a delight to the eye .... To see a solitary human
figure descending such a road .. .is to realize the enveloping quality of the earth, which can create,
as it does here, a mysterious space limit- a womb-like enclosure- which gives the human form
an extraordinary focus and significance."
A nearly identical version of Horned Tree Form dated 1944 and approximately the same size
as the museum's drawing, was listed by Douglas Cooper4 as in a private collection in Connecticut
in 1961.