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Painted entirely form life wearing his West Indies blazer, former captain ‘Gary’ Sobers is depicted by artist Sarah Raphael in the quiet confines of the MCC Secretariat at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Raphael was a traditional figurative and portrait painter who painted from life in a naturalistic style. However, in this portrait Sobers’ hands are shown strangely magnified. This unusual distortion may be a reference to Sobers’ birth defect that left him with an extra figure on each hand (removed at birth).
Just three years after this portrait was completed Raphael moved away from the traditional portraiture that dominated her career, to produce disorientating and brightly coloured abstract works partly inspired by cartoons.