In this first major study of the work of the painter John Wonnacott
(b.1940), Charles Saumarez Smith has surveyed a body of work produced at
a tangent to the orthodoxies of modernism. Exploring the artist's
formative experiences at the Slade, which connected him with artists
such as Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews and the School of London more
broadly, Saumarez Smith roots Wonnacott's approach in his commitment to
the discipline of drawing, his acute skills in observational analysis
and the mechanics of graphic invention that makes his visual response to
the world so memorable.
Alongside commissioned portraits created in the grandest of
architectural spaces, from naval bases to the Painted Hall at Greenwich
and including John Major in 10 Downing Street and the Royal Family in
Buckingham Palace, he has produced a revealing diary of self-portraits
stretching back from his early teens and landscape paintings of light
and sky which are celebrations of his native Essex coastline. In
presenting the full range of Wonnacott's impressive oeuvre, the scope of
the artist's remarkable achievement is revealed.