Painter and printmaker. Born in Yorkshire, Wadsworth attended Bradford School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London, where he won prizes for his landscape and figure painting. During the First World War he served as an intelligence officer in the Navy and worked on dazzle camouflage for ships, experiences that inspired his monumental war paintings. He pioneered a revival of tempera as a medium and returned to a more representational style in the 1920s. A technical perfectionist, Wadsworth's style was influenced by his wide reading of books on painting techniques. Wadsworth is better known as a landscape, seascape and still life painter and this is one of only three self-portraits. It is painted in egg tempera on gesso panel, a medium that is very typical of this period in his career.