Grayson Perry (born 1960) is one of Britain's leading artists. He is best known for his ceramic pots, with drawn, incised and transfer-printed decoration, but he also make prints, designs tapestries, and has even designed a house (albeit a rather eccentric holiday-let). His imagery is a potent combination of contemporary urban themes, often autobiographical, with social and political critiques, but often represented in the idiom of historical exemplars, and incorporating decorative styles and motifs from earlier periods.

He has described this print as follows: 'This is me, both as artist and model in my studio. I wanted to make something in the tradition of the reclining nude. I'm hoping it will be popular with educated middle-class people who might enjoy spotting the art-historical references within it. Reclining Artist is both an idealized fantasy and also the messy reality. It is perhaps me expressing my desire to be a sex object and also show off my cultural capital and boyish paraphernalia. The sofa is draped in a test piece of my 2011 tapestry Map of Truths and Beliefs. Alan Measles, my teddy bear and metaphor for masculinity and god, appears as a sculpture, as an inflatable and on a dress hanging on the wall. The cat is called Kevin.'

Perry has presented himself as his alter ego, Clare, in a pose that evokes Manet’s ‘Olympia’, and he has amplified the idea of self-portraiture by including a wealth of other cultural allusions, from a book on the architect Zaha Hadid to a copy of Viz magazine. Rendered in Perry’s characteristic style, with dense abundant detail and clashing, saturated colours and flat perspective, 'Reclining Artist' neatly summarises Perry’s many and diverse influences – many drawn from popular culture – and his abiding interests in gender, identity and constructions of masculinity (Perry is famously a transvestite who often appears in public styled and dressed in an exaggerated mode of femininity). In his work, and in a documentary TV series he has explored masculinity.