Helen Sutherland in Interwar Northumberland: Patronage and Place

Abstract

From 1928 to 1939 the art collector Helen Sutherland rented Rock Hall, a large manor house partly dating from the 13th century and located near the coast in rural Northumberland. Throughout this period, interspersed with regular returns to London, Rock served, in her words, as a ‘place of refuge and renewal’ for friends, including the painter and poet David Jones, curator and collector Jim Ede and artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson. This, for Sutherland, was a ‘greatly loved landscape of seashore, hills, saints, legends, birds and all the friends who came there’. Such a perception of the relatively unpeopled rural north of England is important, not simply in terms of Sutherland’s experience, but as it speaks to wider interwar contexts of modernism and modernity, rurality and notions of regional and national identity. With a processual and relational understanding of place, I consider the nature and implications of Helen Sutherland’s art collection and her form of collecting, the character of her social and cultural networks and the extent to which patronage itself can contribute to a production of place.