While man ventured to experience direct relations with the landscape, it allowed him personal choices and intimist ways, which are, in my view, as important as conventional practices for the identification of places.

The first painting Dannatt ever bought was a lyrical intimist nude by Kenneth Rowntree, 1943, and there are examples in the collection of many different modes of post-war art, including Robert Buhler, Patrick Heron, Victor Pasmore and Paolozzi, with a few pieces from earlier times and a number of excellent prints by mainstream European modernists, indicating that graphics are often the best route to building a collection with moderate means.

What was unprecedented in his work was the fusion of an intimist sensibility (not unrelated to Joseph Cornell's) with the mythological ambition of postwar abstraction and an almost circuslike sense of spectacle.