Michael Wishart (1928-1996) was a well-established painter with many one-man exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries, the Redfern Gallery and the Mayor Gallery. His artistic circle of friends included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland, David Hockney and Patrick Procter.

The art critic David Sylvester described Michael's work as that of ‘a sensibility that is at once shamelessly romantic and deeply sophisticated, and which endows the wide open spaces of the great outdoors with a sort of hothouse preciosity . . . he is one of the select band of English romantic painters who are truly painters’ (The Listener, Redfern Gallery Exhibition 1956). The critic and explorer Nicholas Guppy praised his ‘scintillating paint- and print-handling skills’ and called him a ‘contemporary master’. 

Michael Wishart’s obituary in the Independent pointed to the Blakean visionary quality in his work: ‘His larger, more abstract canvases are his best, evoking a mystical dream-world out of Odilon Redon or André Derain, neo-romantic landscapes and hidden faces captured in bravura swathes of oil. These were Blakean visions’ (1996, Independent, Obituary).