Payoff

"Gambling," says Painter Graham Sutherland, "is awfully like painting. However much you know about painting there's always the gamble as to whether that actual physical touch will do what you want it to." At 45, Sutherland is one of Britain's best landscape painters; until lately he had never tackled realistic portraiture. When his first try, a full-length oil of Author Somerset Maugham, was finished last week, artist and sitter agreed that the gamble had paid off.

Like Sutherland's landscapes, the portrait had the hot, bright colors of the Riviera, where he lives much of the year. His landscapes, more than halfway abstract, showed things like grasshoppers hopping into scarlet immensities and bushes brandishing their thorns at green skies. The portrait was equally harsh. Posed against a livid yellow background, Maugham sat with folded arms beneath a fringe of tropical palms. His jut-jawed old face seemed to betray a struggle between pain and hauteur.

Maugham called it "magnificent," and added, "there is no doubt that Graham has painted me in a mood and with an expression I sometimes have, even without being aware of it. . ."

Taking his red-slippered ease in the garden of his Riviera villa last week, the frail, friendly painter thought he might do some more portraits: "Someone wants me to try a self-portrait and I've been putting it off and off. Now I rather think I'd like to have a go at it." Meanwhile he supposed he would go on filling his days with sketches of the surrounding landscape, and escorting his pretty wife to the Casino at Monte Carlo now and then in the evenings, for a spot of gambling.

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