Stuart Pearson Wright 2020, 2020

This characteristically uncanny work by celebrated portrait painter Stuart Pearson Wright was painted during the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020. Encircled by COVID-19 microbes, the work is a reminder of the uncertainties and anxieties of those unprecedented times.

Stuart Pearson Wright studied at the Slade School of Art followed by the Royal Drawing School During his time at the Slade, Pearson Wright won a travel award from the National Portrait Gallery as part of its 1998 BP Portrait Awards. He drove around Britain in a van, producing sketches and paintings as he went. The resulting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was called From Eastbourne to Edinburgh: A Painter's Odyssey. Godfrey Barker in the Evening Standard labelled the artist "A Hogarth for our Times" and Brian Sewell described the paintings as "images of such eccentricity and even madness that they fit perfectly the English tradition of the odd man out: the Blake, Spencer, Cecil Collins line, and the largest of them should at once have been bought by the Tate." 

In 2000 Pearson Wright won the BP Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The National Portrait Gallery subsequently acquired paintings of John Hurt, Adam Cooper and J.K. Rowling, plus a series of drawings which were displayed in 2006's Most People are Other People.