Alan Sorrell’s early ambition was to be a painter of imaginative narrative pictures, often in the form of mural decorations. In this he was successful, creating throughout his life evocative compositions influenced by much that he had seen of Italian Renaissance painting, but filtered through his own version of a vigorous northern European, English tradition. It is an important aim of this publication to demonstrate that the archaeological and historical ‘reconstruction’ drawings and paintings of the later part of his life are also important works of art which, if they were magically stripped of their association with archaeology, would still stand as wonderful realisations of an interior world of the imagination.

Alan Sorrell’s vision was born out of the Romantic English tradition exemplified by Blake, Palmer and their 20th-century disciples. Through the publication of this book and the accompanying exhibition at The Sir John Soane’s Museum Sorrell’s importance as a major artist of the Neo-Romantic movement will at last be recognised.