Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of John Wonnacott: The Jardine Matheson Commission and City Views.  John Wonnacott (b. 1940) is one of Great Britain’s leading figurative artists, closely associated with the loosely affiliated group known as the School of London.  After graduating from the Slade School of Art in the early 1960s he has never deviated from a working method focused exclusively on direct observation whether the subject be portrait or landscape. Martin Gayford has written of him that in spite of his passionate devotion to the great tradition of Western painting, he is “an emphatically contemporary artist, painting the world with a degree of precision and intellectual rigor that few today can match. Perspective has long been regarded – since even before the advent of high modernism, perhaps – as dull, academic, old hat. But John Wonnacott has discovered in it new possibilities. It is his mechanism for investigating what he sees, reintegrating it on a canvas and setting in train an intricate dance of formal relationships.”

An ongoing pre-occupation has been portraits of family and friends and the landscape around his home and studio in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex but he is also widely recognized for commissioned portraits culminating in The Royal Family, A Centenary Portrait, 1999-2000 (now in The National Portrait Gallery, London).  Early in 2012 Wonnacott was commissioned to paint a group portrait of four of the directors of Jadine Matheson, the powerful international conglomerate founded in Hong Kong in July, 1832.  He was asked to use as his model a painting by the English artist, George Chinnery, On Dent’s Veranda, which represents four foreign traders sitting on the balcony of the house belonging to Jardine’s principal rival at the time.

Wonnacott was able to make life-studies from three of the directors based in London although he had to wait until he got to Hong Kong before he was able to draw and paint the fourth director.  During a stay of several weeks he familiarized himself with the setting chosen for the group portrait – an office on the 48th floor of Jardine House – and worked on a preliminary study for the painting that after going through several stages was completed in his studio in Essex. Although not large in scale, Taipans on the 48th Floor is rigorously planned and densely packed with meaning, a celebration of Jardine as a merchant trading company that departs from close observation of specific individuals and settings and ricochets backwards in time to its founding.

Also included in the exhibition are five remarkable city views, two of Hong Kong completed in 2014,  two of New York painted in 2000-2002 and in complete contrast, a view of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Wonnacott’s work is included in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Tate Britain; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the House of Commons, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

*image (left)
John Wonnacott
Taipans on the 48th Floor, 2013
Oil on canvas
courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art