Rich rewards

For as long as I’ve been interested in Modern British art, I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by the work of Graham Sutherland (1903–80). One of the first Cork Street exhibitions I went to as a schoolboy was of paintings, gouaches, watercolours and graphics by Sutherland from the collection of Douglas Cooper, held at the Redfern Gallery in the autumn of 1976. I was enormously impressed, particularly by the golden-eyed toad rampant, the thorny sentinel figures, a 1944 Welsh landscape and a gouache of bomb-damaged buildings from 1942. (My recall is not always quite so accurate: in fact, I have the fold-out card from the exhibition before me as I write.) Only much later did I learn that the reason the great collector and art historian Douglas Cooper was selling his Sutherlands was that he had fallen out with the artist — not an unusual occurrence for such a touchy and irascible man — and wished publicly to withdraw his favour, having long been a committed Sutherland supporter.