Furnival emerged from the Royal College of Art in London in 1959 with an avowed insistence on deliberately exact drawing. His contemporaries included Joe Tilson, Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Ron Kitaj, the RCA pop artists who were inspired by advertising, popular culture, poetry, and mythic figures from the mass media – like Furnival, they too had moved on from the dominant action-painting style of the late 1950s. His work shares many of the concerns of British and American pop art, but his vision is somehow more subtle. John Furnival taught at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, and latterly at Bath, in its seminal period in the 1960s and 70s. In 1964, he co-founded the press, Openings, with Dom Sylvester Houédard, working with artists and poets in an early move to make art ‘mailable’ – these included Tom Phillips and Edwin Morgan, and also Ian Hamilton Finlay with whom he collaborated for a period for the Wild Hawthorn Press. Furnival participated in the First international Exhibition of Experimental Poetry in Oxford in 1965, and the exhibition that followed – Between Poetry and Painting – organised by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street, London in the same year. Henri Chopin was another associate and collaborator, as was Furnival’s great friend, the late American poet/publisher, Jonathan Williams with whom he worked on the folio, St Swithin's Swivet, and on the still on-going project they started together in the early 1980s, Letters to the Great Dead, with its very particular combination of text and image.