One of the most important realist artists of the last half century, de Francia's portraits, mainly produced in the 1950s and 1960s, testify to the fertile intellectual and cultural milieu of the period. Presenting a wide range of sitters including writers, critics, artists and musicians, as well as leading academics, many of de Francia's portrait subjects held similar social concerns and shared a common sympathy for Left Wing causes.

What is most striking is the internationalism of these subjects with de Francia depicting a cosmopolitan array of figures including the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, the poet and writer Hugo Manning, the composer Alexander Goehr, the leading scientist J.D.Bernal, an Indian art student Kulwant Aurora, the Jamaican-born architect John Holness and the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo.

This was the second solo exhibition of Peter de Francia's work at the gallery, following the exhibition Peter de Francia: after the bombing staged in March 2005, which included paintings and drawings made as studies for his major early painting The Bombing of Sakiet as well as a selection of his famous Disparates drawings.