Willson (Richard)

caricatured portrait of the Russian novelist, historian and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), who brought the horrors of the Soviet gulag system to the attention of the world, having been imprisoned for many years after the Second World War for his subversive writing, later being sent into internal exile before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, only to return in 1994 after the state had been dissolved, he is here depicted forlornly holding a hand-axe, standing in a desolate landscape.

Richard Willson (1939-2011) began as a cartoonist for The Observer in 1968, before moving to The Times and Sunday Times in the early 1970s. His popular and distinctive work also frequently appeared in The Spectator, Washington Post, New Statesman, and New Scientist,

pen and black ink, 365 x 265 mm. (14 13/8 x 10 1/2 in), signed lower right, titled lower left,