Tom Phillips Self Portrait, 1984

This striking self-portrait is by the artistic polymath Tom Phillips, who passed away in January this year. Alongside his work as a musician, concrete poet, composer, librettist and curator, Phillips worked as a portrait painter for many years, with famous subjects including the Monty Python cast, Brian Eno, Samuel Beckett and Salman Rushdie.  

Born in London in 1937, Tom Phillips attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and Camberwell School of Art. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989 and was Chairman of the Royal Academy’s Exhibitions Committee from 1995 to 2007. He has had retrospective exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Royal Academy, London; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Since the mid 1970s, Phillips has received many commissions for site-specific artworks and portraits. He has made tapestries for St. Catherine's College, Oxford, street mosaics for his native Peckham, and ornament and memorials for sacred spaces, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Phillips's portrait subjects have included Samuel Beckett, Iris Murdoch, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, and the Monty Python team. Phillips received the Frances Williams Memorial Prize in 1983 for his illustration and new translation of Dante's Inferno, and co-directed a television adaptation of the Inferno with Peter Greenaway. As well as creating his own opera Irma, based on the characters of A Humument, Phillips devised the libretto for Tarik O'Regan's operatic version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness which premiered at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre in 2011, and had its US premiere at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle in 2015.