David Inshaw: the great romantic

David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an exhibition of new and old work at the Fine Art Society, I went down to Devizes to interview him. He has lived for much of his life there, with brief interludes in Bristol, London, Cambridge and Wales. In Devizes he is surrounded by the countryside that has most inspired him — the Marlborough Downs and the open stretches of Salisbury Plain, the trees and hills of his beloved Wiltshire.

Inshaw is a landscape and figure painter, known to many as a Ruralist (a group he co-founded in 1975 with his great friend Sir Peter Blake, and which he left in 1983). He is perhaps the greatest living proponent of the English Romantic tradition, a painter of nudes and lyrical landscapes very much in the tradition of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash.