Victor Willing's body of work is small but ambitious. His revelatory late paintings were presented in a major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1986 and their bold figuration well suited the critical refocusing of attention on contemporary painting, especially figuration, that was highlighted by the seminal international survey exhibition, A New Spirit in Painting, (Royal Academy, 1981).

Willing established his reputation whilst still a student at the Slade School of Art in the early 1950s. In the words of Nicholas Serota: 'In a bright generation Victor Willing burned brighter than most' and his paintings 'continue to demonstrate that this was no shooting star… but rather a fiery comet which would eventually guide us all'. (Nicholas Serota, 'Foreword' to Victor Willing, A Retrospective Exhibition 1952-86, Whitechapel, 1986).

A favourite of the head of the Slade School of Art, William Coldstream, and a close friend of fellow student Michael Andrews, Willing shared a home with the critic David Sylvester and received praise from him as a 'synthesis' of Bacon and Coldstream, the 'Dionysian and the Apollonian'. Then after his marriage to another Slade student, Paula Rego, Willing spent many years living in Portugal before the family returned to London.

His later paintings explore dream imagery and present a personal iconography that parallels Philip Guston who likewise moved from the paintings that had established his reputation in the 1950s towards a new language of figuration that, despite its sophistication, superficially approached the childlike or cartoony.