Ignatius Sancho

Artist: Dreph_
Country of origin: UK
Mediums of choice: My work is predominantly oil paint in the studio and spray-paint and masonry paint for my murals.
Style: I am a portrait and figurative painter. My subjects are real people or real people painted from my imagination.
Personal inspiration: I am inspired, as much by 80s British underground comics and New York subway art, as I am the old masters.
Frost Fair inspiration: Ignatius Sancho was a British writer, composer, business owner, and abolitionist. He was celebrated in the late 18th-century as a man of letters, a social reformer and an acute observer of English life. Sancho was a former Enslaved African who advocated for abolition through prolific letter-writing and became the first person of African descent to cast a vote in a British general election. He lived in Greenwich a few miles east of Bankside along the Thames and then later in Blackheath. He was born in 1729 and died in 1780. During his lifetime a Frost Fair occurred in 1739–40 so tentatively I would like to imagine that he would have attended this fair as a child, given his close proximity to the Thames. The portrait is loosely based on a painting by Thomas Gainsborough painted in 1768.

Dreph