Self Portrait in a Yellow Waistcoat (facsimile)

Desmond Haughton was born in Hammersmith, London. His parents moved from the Carribean to England in the 1950s. In reflecting on his childhood he remembered that 'as a child, I explored the history of painting through books and visits to the National Gallery where I would copy the paintings I admired the most, work by Gainsborough, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Caravaggio. It had not escaped my notice that there were hardly any paintings depicting black people as individuals, although I knew there had been sizeable black communities living throughout Europe for centuries. Rather than put me off, this gap in Britain’s cultural canon actually served to inspire me.' Many of his works are self portraits and this painting entered the collections in 1990s in a group of four portraits by young British artists .