In 1942 Sutherland, in his capacity as an official war artist, was commissioned to paint the tin mines at Geevor in Cornwall. “To make drawings of the mines had only the vaguest relation to the war but I was certainly presented with a new world – and a world of such beauty and such mystery that I shall never forget it……”.

In Roger Berthoud’s opinion the tin mine drawings are “Sutherland’s finest work as a war artist.” Inspired by the dramatic subject matter and almost certainly influenced by Henry Moore’s recent series of Shelter drawings, Sutherland creates an extraordinarily vivid record of the miners’ claustrophobic world.

Sutherland wrote, “Under ground I did a number of portraits. This was mainly to distract the attention of the miners from what I was really drawing. I did not lack customers and the poses struck were splendidly incongruous in the environment. The heads I did were small and naturalistic as suited their purpose; but the deeper significance of these men only gradually became clear to me. It was as if they were a kind of different species – ennobled under ground, and with an added stature which above ground they lacked, and my feeling was that in spite of the hardness of the work in this nether world, this place held for them – subconsciously perhaps – an element of daily enthralment.”

This drawing was part of the group bought by Pier Paolo and Marzia Ruggerini at the time of the exhibition of Sutherland’s war-time drawings organised by the British Council in Milan in 1979. The Ruggerinis first met Sutherland in 1965. Pier Paolo was a celebrated Italian film maker and in 1967 his documentary on the artist led Sutherland to return to Wales to paint there for the first time in twenty years. The Ruggerinis became great friends and collectors of Sutherland. Their house, Il Castello in Pavia near Milan, had a famous collection of the artist’s work.