Which artist does Stephen Dillane play in season 1 of The Crown?

In season 1 of The Crown, Stephen Dillane plays the artist Graham Sutherland.

Sutherland appears in the episode “Assassins,” where he is commissioned to paint a portrait of Winston Churchill. The storyline draws on a real 1954 commission arranged to mark Churchill’s 80th birthday and explores the clash between an artist’s modern style and the politician’s public self-image.

Churchill disliked the finished portrait, which was later destroyed. The series dramatizes the destruction as an act involving Churchill’s wife, Clementine, but the historical details are more complicated: the painting was reportedly destroyed by people working for the family after it was delivered.

Sutherland was a major British modern artist known especially for landscapes, watercolours, and oils. The alternatives in the quiz—John Piper, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon—were also prominent British artists, but none plays the painter of Churchill’s portrait in season 1.