One of the pleasures of the weekend has been seeing an extensive collection of work by the PRA, acquired either direct from him or on the secondary market (please forgive the unprofessional photographs).

There are big paintings from his early De Chirico phase, not long after he had left the Slade and before I knew him:

Shield, a grand painterly painting from the period of the exhibition New Spirit in Painting (it’s dated 1982-1984):

Wing, a work from 1986, when his work was becoming looser and before he went to Berlin:

Thicket, a work from the late 1980s (1988 to be exact) still with its original Nigel Greenwood frame:

There’s a work from his Wagnerian phase in the early 1990s, when he was commissioned by a private collector to do a series of paintings from The Ring (this is a study for The Rainbow Bridge dated 1993):

A later day painting (i.e. painted at speed in a day) which was shown in his big exhibition at the Walsall art gallery:

I’m also very keen on the small-scale table sculptures:

In the garden, there’s a big winged piece:

It must be by far the largest collection of his work anywhere.   It’s possible to see the consistency of his interest in mythology, but also the full range of his career in sculpture as well as painting, sometimes evidently about subject, but often only allusively so, exploring the meaning of literary symbolism through paint.