Visual enlightenment

Leonard McComb (born Glasgow 1930, of Irish parents) is a figurative painter of rare particularity and achievement. He is also a sculptor and his work spans a broad range of utterance: polished bronze, oil on canvas, pastel, pencil and gold leaf on paper (in his affectionate portrait of fellow painter and friend, the late Carel Weight, for instance), meticulous line drawing and etching. He is represented in the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, is an acclaimed teacher (he was Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, 1995–8), and has shown regularly in mixed exhibitions since the mid-1970s. He doubted much of the work he did before that, and destroyed a great deal of it in a dramatic bonfire. He is something of a perfectionist and exhibits only rarely in commercial galleries; in fact his last dealer show was 12 years ago. As a consequence, although he is a favourite at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the breadth of his work is not generally known to the public.