William Townsend was celebrated as painter and chronicler of his times. As Frances Spalding writes: "William Townsend occupies a very particular role within twentieth-century British art owing to his ability to try out, work through and assimilate what he needed from the fast-changing ideas and issues that animated painting before, during, and after the Second World War. He was observer, practitioner and commentator, a multiple role that gives him a special place in any record of that period."