Patrick Edward Phillips (1907-1976)

               Patrick Edward Phillips was an artist in oils and watercolours, as well as an art teacher, who was particularly successful as a portrait painter. He studied at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting (1926–30) under Francis Earnest Jackson (1872-1945), Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) and Charles Shannon (1863-1937). These teachers were all skilled draughtsmen and specialists in portraiture, and Jackson and Philpot had a shared history as students of the Académie Julian in Paris. Knowing this, Phillips’ own art and career gain a sense of artistic context. Phillips was also a skilled draughtsman, who took a particularly painterly approach to portraiture which can be said to have a basis in the bravura painting espoused in the French academies at the end of the nineteenth century. Examples such as the image, right, also show the influence of nineteenth-century French art in terms of framing and composition, as well as the use of flat, block colours (Cézanne, Degas, Manet). His portraits also often possess a frankness, evidence perhaps of the legacy felt from the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec, Walter Sickert and other artists influenced by caricature and popular illustration.

Phillips’ career was interrupted by the Second World War. He served in the Middle-East and became an official war artist before being demobilised. After the war he returned to the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting as its co-principal from 1946 to 1955. He continued to paint full-time and received institutional recognition in his late fifties and early sixties, being elected a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1964 and the Royal Watercolour Society in 1968. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club. He was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and exhibited at several notable London galleries. His works are held in many private and public collections, including by the Tate Gallery, London.