JOHN OPIE: THE CORNISH WONDER, the greatest of all the Cornish artists is an almost legendary figure. He is the classic eighteenth century carpenter's boy whose life was transformed by genius; the Cornish peasant lad who went to seek his fortune in London and became so famous that he was buried with honour in St Paul's Cathedral among the nation's greatest and best. He was an important artist in that golden age of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence. Fashionable people crowded to the studio home of the young man they called 'The Cornish Wonder' and he was the talk of London. He reached the highest levels of the art establishment when he became the Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and he influenced a generation at precisely the moment when England could justly claim to have an internationally important School of Painting for the first time in its history.