Figurative and abstract painter, and musician, born in Edinburgh. The family moved to Liverpool in 1943 and Sutcliffe attended Prescot Grammar School, 1950–6. He entered Liverpool College of Art, 1956, where he was encouraged by the teacher Arthur Ballard and was a friend and contemporary of John Lennon. After taking his diploma the College refused to let him continue with a teacher’s training course; it contended that he was a painter and not a teacher, having worked with originality and shown with the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1959 (his painting was subsequently bought by John Moores). Sutcliffe in 1959 began playing with Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll group Johnny and the Moondogs as a bass guitarist and travelled with the Beatles Pop group to Hamburg in autumn 1960.
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Sutcliffe was encouraged to take up painting again and during the Beatles’ second visit to Hamburg he enrolled at the city’s Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste and left the group. In 1961–2 he studied in Eduardo Paolozzi’s master class. Died in Hamburg of a brain haemorrhage. There was a major retrospective at Walker Art Gallery in 1964, followed by many other solo exhibitions and appearances in The Art of the Beatles around the world. In 1995 there was a solo show at Liverpool’s John Moores University when the Stuart Sutcliffe Fellowship Award was launched, to be granted annually to a student who successfully combined visual art with sound/music (the first winner was Jonathan Hannah); also Proud Central, 2001. Walker Art Gallery holds Sutcliffe’s Hamburg Painting No 2. In 2003, the auctioneers Bonhams sold personal mementos belonging to Sutcliffe, “the fifth Beatle,” from the collection of his sister Pauline.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
