We have commemorated one of Britain’s leading Neo-Romantic artists, Graham Sutherland, with a blue plaque. A major figure in twentieth-century British art, Sutherland’s influence continues to this day and can be seen in the work of Lucian Freud, amongst others.

The plaque will mark number 8 Dorset Road, Merton Park, his childhood home in south London, where he said he experienced ‘his first taste of landscape’ in its garden. After quitting an engineering apprenticeship, Sutherland trained at the Goldsmiths College of Art in the 1920s. He was commissioned as an official war artist during WWII, and his artwork recorded moving scenes from the London Blitz, including Devastation, 1941: An East End Street.

An experimental portrait of the writer Somerset Maugham resulted in over 50 portrait commissions in the 1950s and 60s. Notoriously, parliament commissioned him to paint Churchill as a birthday present; Churchill hated the portrait, saying it showed him as a ‘gross and cruel monster’. It was later destroyed by his wife Clementine.

Sutherland, who had converted to Roman Catholicsm, also became known for his religious artwork, the most famous being his design for the immense tapestry, Christ in Glory, in (Sir) Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral.

He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1960, to which his astonished response was: ‘I can only pray that I will not be thought respectable’.

Rosemary Hill said: “Graham Sutherland was a child of the south London suburbs who felt a very English longing for a half-remembered, half-imagined rural past. In a Romantic tradition that descends from Samuel Palmer, Sutherland was perhaps the last Arts and Crafts artist, a master in tapestry and stained glass as well as an etcher and painter.

“After his death his reputation rose and fell, overshadowed sometimes by that of his more spectacular friend Francis Bacon. It has now found its proper level, close to the heart of twentieth-century British art.”