Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe (23 June 1940 – 10 April 1962) was a British painter and musician from Edinburgh, Scotland, best known as the original bass guitarist of the Beatles.

Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles" (sic), as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets.

After leaving the Beatles, he enrolled in the Hamburg College of Art, studying under future pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who later wrote a report stating that Sutcliffe was one of his best students.

While studying in West Germany, Sutcliffe began suffering from intense headaches and experiencing acute light sensitivity.

Charles had moved to Liverpool in 1943 to help with wartime work and subsequently signed on as a ship's engineer, so he was often at sea during his son's early years.

He moved to Hillary Mansions at 3 Gambier Terrace, home of art student Margaret Chapman, who vied with Sutcliffe to be the best painter in class.

[14] The flat was opposite the new Anglican cathedral in the rundown area of Liverpool 8, with bare lightbulbs and a mattress on the floor in the corner.

[18] After talking to Sutcliffe one night at the Casbah Coffee Club (owned by Pete Best's mother, Mona Best), Lennon and McCartney persuaded him to buy a Höfner 500/5 model bass guitar on hire-purchase from Frank Hessey's Music Shop.

[31] While Sutcliffe is often described in Beatles biographies as appearing uncomfortable onstage and occasionally playing with his back to the audience, Pete Best, their drummer at the time, denies this.

[41] Sutcliffe later borrowed money from his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr so he could fly back to Liverpool on Friday, 20 January 1961, although he returned to Hamburg in March with the other Beatles.

[42] After being awarded a postgraduate scholarship,[13] he enrolled at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, where he studied under the tutelage of Eduardo Paolozzi.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (extreme left, in front of fellow artist Aubrey Beardsley).

She had been brought up by her widowed mother, Nielsa Kirchherr, on Eimsbütteler Strasse, in a wealthy part of the Hamburg suburb of Altona.

She showed them her bedroom, which she had decorated in black including the furniture, with silver foil on the walls and a large tree branch hanging from the ceiling.

[12] One of Sutcliffe's paintings was shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool as part of the John Moores exhibition, from November 1959 to January 1960.

After the exhibition, Moores bought Sutcliffe's canvas for £65 (equivalent to £1,891 in 2023), which was then equal to 6–7 weeks' wages for an average working man.

[15] The picture Moores bought was titled Summer Painting, and Sutcliffe attended a formal dinner to celebrate the exhibition with another art student, Susan Williams.

Murray noted only one of the pieces actually got to the exhibition (because they stopped at a pub to celebrate), but sold nonetheless because Moores bought it for his son.

His later works are typically untitled, constructed from heavily impastoed slabs of pigment in the manner of de Staël (whom he learned about from Surrey-born art instructor Nicky Horsfield) and overlaid with scratched or squeezed linear elements creating enclosed spaces.

2 was purchased by Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery and is one of a series entitled Hamburg in which surface and colour changes produce atmospheric energy.

[57][58] Lennon later hung two of Sutcliffe's paintings in his house (Kenwood) in Weybridge, and McCartney had a Paolozzi sculpture in his Cavendish Avenue home.

[40][64] Sutcliffe's mother flew to Hamburg with Beatles manager Brian Epstein and returned to Liverpool with her son's body.

[4] Sutcliffe is buried in Huyton Parish Church Cemetery (also known as St. Michael's) in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, Merseyside in North West England.

Sutcliffe was portrayed by David Nicholas Wilkinson in Birth of the Beatles (1979) and by Lee Williams in In His Life: The John Lennon Story (2000).

[73] Sutcliffe's role in the Beatles' early career and the factors that led him to leave the group are dramatised in the 1994 film Backbeat, in which he was portrayed by American actor Stephen Dorff.