During his long and highly successful career, the sculptor David Wynne, who has died aged 88, attracted an array of prestigious patrons, without ever gaining the approval of critics or curators. Although he was seen by some as a reactionary figure, his approach was as alien to academic art as it was to modernism. Wynne's direct response to nature, recorded in vivid sketchbooks, was not mediated by either historical or contemporary art, and often verged on the intrepid or even the foolhardy. His celebrated dolphin pieces were based on hours of swimming with the animal, and he once spent three weeks in the Rocky Mountains producing a marble statue of a grizzly bear. He never carried a gun, even when stalking leopards in Africa.
These immersive experiences clearly suited Wynne better than the zoology that he studied, for a while, at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was not a man for lecture halls or, for that matter, art schools, and his work displays a kind of suave simplicity, giving the viewer immediate satisfaction without any aftertaste of difficult concepts or ambiguity. As he explained in a film made by Victoria Salmon in 2009, Wynne had a disdain for "trying to be clever", saying: "I am celebrating the animal. I am not trying to make anything new. There is nothing new under the sun but the truth must be stated with each generation. I really believe that's so."
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