John Bellany was born at Port Seton in East Lothian and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. A visit to the Max Beckmann retrospective in London in 1965 and a trip to East Germany in 1967, where a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp affected his work profoundly. Bellany used his immediate surroundings and his own experiences as the raw material for his art. In 1988 he underwent liver transplant surgery. As soon as he came out of the intensive care unit at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, he set to work producing self-portraits, charting the course of his hospitalisation and convalescence and covering the walls of his hospital room with drawings and watercolours. They chart his experience: physical pain, the fear that he might not recover, and, as in this work, his eventual optimism about a new lease of life.