John Opie – The Cornish Wonder was the son of a Cornish carpenter who went to London to seek his fortune. His paintings were works of genius which made him so famous that he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was a great painter in the days of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Turner, but his name almost disapeared from history. This book re-paints his portrait.
Rather than experiment on the wheel, he first sketched his pots and increased his mastery of brushwork by studying the volumes of Chinese exercises used, for centuries, in the training of painters.