JOHN OPIE: THE CORNISH WONDER, the greatest of all the Cornish artists is an almost legendary figure. He is the classic eighteenth century carpenter’s boy whose life was transformed by genius; the Cornish peasant lad who went to seek his fortune in London and became so famous that he was buried with honour in St Paul’s Cathedral among the nation’s greatest and best. He was an important artist in that golden age of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence. Fashionable people crowded to the studio home of the young man they called ‘The Cornish Wonder’ and he was the talk of London. He reached the highest levels of the art establishment when he became the Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and he influenced a generation at precisely the moment when England could justly claim to have an internationally important School of Painting for the first time in its history. His legacy of hundreds and hundreds of paintings can be found in national museums and art galleries from the Louvre to the Hermitage, Philadelphia to Budapest; his great historical paintings created memorable and lasting images of crucial moments in history; his portraits capture an incomparable range of the faces of a generation, his prints were sold in thousands and taken across the world. He is in the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Collection, in reference books, encyclopaedias, lists of important portraits, lists of great artists, lists of great Cornishmen, even lists of quotations - yet most people have never heard of him.

This masterly biography, the first for nearly a hundred years tells the story of Opie, his disasters and his triumphs in a very personal way and does much to bring Opie’s significance to a contemporary audience.

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