Graham Sutherland work was commissioned in 1954 by the Houses of Parliament in 1954.
But the former prime minister disliked it so much that it was secretly burnt on the orders of his wife, Lady Clementine Churchill.
The plaque, awarded by English Heritage, is located at his childhood home, at 8, Dorset Road, his childhood home where he said he experienced ‘his first taste of landscape’ in its garden.
After quitting an engineering apprenticeship, Sutherland trained at the Goldsmith’s 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 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.”
