Untitled 97

Tom Phillips was born in 1937. He is an English painter, printmaker, illustrator and composer. He studied English literature and art at Camberwell School of Art in the early 1960s and was initially influenced by the language of Pop art. He was taught by Frank Auerbach. He won the John Moores prize in 1969 but was possibly better known at that time for his musical compositions.

A Humument has become a touchstone of Phillips’s oeuvre with its characters and quotations populating other paintings, works of art criticism, his opera Irma and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s. Since the 1970s Phillips has also become known for his portraiture, including Samuel Beckett and Iris Murdoch and in 1989 he became only the second artist to have a retrospective of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.