Study for a Palm Tree

Known early in his career for densely worked etchings inspired by Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), the British painter and printmaker Graham Sutherland enjoyed success as a painter of abstract landscapes and portraits of such luminaries as Somerset Maugham, Konrad Adenauer, and Sir Winston Churchill. Beginning in the late 1940s, Sutherland regularly visited the south of France, and from 1955 he made his home in Menton. In response to this new environment, Mediterranean motifs such as palm trees and vine pergolas began to appear in his work, and his palette brightened with tones of pink, coral, and green. The "Arthur" to whom Sutherland gave the present drawing, as noted in the inscription on the verso, was his friend and dealer the American collector Arthur Jeffress (1905-1961), at whose house in Venice Sutherland stayed each summer during the 1950s.