Born into a working-class family in London's Battersea, David Gommon first studied art at the local Polytechnic when he was sixteen. Aged nineteen, he was taken up by Lucy Carrington Wertheim - the London-based gallerist renowned for adventurously showing work by Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkins and gifted naive artists - who gave him his first exhibition. Aided by insights from the artist's own evocative writings, Philip Vann's text intricately examines the development of Gommon's predominantly landscape art – infused with mystical delicacy of colour and subtle audacity of composition that often tends towards surrealism – rooted latterly in the paradisical surroundings of the Northamptonshire village of Hardingstone where he and his wife Jean lived for several decades.