Paul Wonner (1920–2008) was an American painter and a significant figure in the Bay Area Figurative movement. Born in Tucson, Arizona, Wonner earned a bachelor’s degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 1941. After military service and several years in New York, he returned to California and earned a B.F.A. in art in 1952 and M.F.A. in art in 1953 from the University of California, Berkeley. There he met painter William Theophilus Brown, who became his lifelong partner. During the mid-1950s, Wonner participated in figure-drawing sessions with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn and joined their movement away from pure abstraction toward recognizable subjects while retaining the expressive brushwork and color of Abstract Expressionism. Wonner and Brown subsequently moved to Davis, where Wonner worked as a librarian at UC Davis. By the late 1960s, Wonner increasingly concentrated on still life, eventually developing the compositions for which he became best known. Inspired partly by Dutch still-life painting, these works combine flowers, fruit, animals and everyday objects in carefully constructed, often theatrical arrangements.