- published: 30 Nov 2014
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Sutherland is a registration county, lieutenancy area and former county of Scotland. It is now within the Highland council area. In Gaelic the area is referred to according to its traditional areas: Dùthaich Mhic Aoidh (or Dùthaich 'Ic Aoidh) (NW), Asainte (Assynt), and Cataibh (East). However, Cataibh will often be used to refer to the area as a whole.
The county town, and only burgh of the county, was Dornoch. Other settlements include Bonar Bridge, Lairg, Brora, Durness, Embo, Tongue, Golspie, Helmsdale, Lochinver, Scourie and Kinlochbervie.
Sutherland became a local government area in 1890, and the county was abolished in 1975, when the Sutherland district was created as one of eight districts of the Highland Region. The region was created at the same time as the district. The district was abolished in 1996, when the region became a council area.
The name Sutherland dates from the era of Norse rule and settlement over much of the Highlands and Islands, under the rule of the jarl of Orkney. Although it contains some of the northernmost land in the island of Great Britain, it was called Suðrland ("southern land") from the standpoint of Orkney and Caithness.
Graham Vivien Sutherland OM (24 August 1903 – 17 February 1980) was an English artist.
He was born in Streatham, the son of a lawyer who later became a civil servant in the Land Registry Office and the Board of Education. He attended Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton and was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey until 1919. Upon leaving school, after some preliminary coaching in art, he began an engineering apprenticeship at the Midland Railway Works in Derby under advice from his parents. After a year he succeeded in persuading his father that he was not destined for a career in engineering, and that he should be allowed to study art. There being no vacancies at his first choice, the Slade School of Fine Art, he entered Goldsmith's College School of Art in 1921, specialising in engraving.
Sutherland's early prints of pastoral subjects show the influence of Samuel Palmer, largely mediated by the older etcher, F.L. Griggs. He did not begin to paint in earnest until he was in his 30s, following the collapse of the print market in 1930 due to the Great Depression. These pieces are mainly landscapes, which show an affinity with the work of Paul Nash. Sutherland focused on the inherent strangeness of natural forms, and abstracting them, sometimes giving his work a surrealist appearance; in 1936 he exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London.