After Raphael (?)

Location

Country: Belgium
City: Brussels
Place: British Embassy, UK representation to the EU & UK delegation to NATO

Tom Phillips has described his encounter with the painting which inspired his own, and this subsequent print, as follows:

In 1972 when helping to judge the John Moores competition, I and the other jurors met in a room just outside of which hung a painting with the unexciting label, 'Umbrian School, c. 1490-1500. Votive Picture'. Looking at a lot of assertively 'modern' art all day (at a rate of four or five pictures a minute) [...] I found myself gaining solace from this little picture, which I had first come to like when visiting the [Walker Art] gallery in 1968. Speaking later to the director I discovered […] that it had frequently been attributed to the young Raphael. By the time my judging duties were over I had become very fond of the picture and had decided to make a work based on it. [...] 450 years of rubbing, restoration, cracking and fading have only left hints of the original's evidently once rich colours. […]

The final version of the picture took the form of a diptych with one canvas showing all the constructional elements and the other the finished painting. A larger single version combines both these elements on one surface where the network of lines which guided every nuance and interval of its configuration can still be clearly discerned. This was also the case in [this] silkscreen print which bears the guarded title After Raphael (1972-73).

After Raphael was extensively reworked by the artist in 2010, and a new version was published in 2011 as a screenprint by CCA galleries.

Born in Clapham, Tom Phillips works as a painter, illustrator, printmaker, writer, curator, theatre set designer and composer. After reading English literature at Oxford University (1957–60), he studied Fine Art at Camberwell School of Art, London, and later taught in art schools in Bath, Ipswich and Wolverhampton. He was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2005. Notable events in his career include the exhibition of his ongoing literary-based work, ‘The Humument’ at the ICA, London in 1973; his curatorship of the ‘Africa: Art of a Continent’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1995; and the retrospectives of his work at the Dulwich Picture and South London Galleries in 1997. Phillips was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to the Arts in 2002, marking the recognition of his life-long commitment to visual culture.

Places

Subjects

painting (as Subject), man, domestic interior

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Tom Phillips (1937 - 2022)

Title

After Raphael (?)

Edition

6/150

Date

1973

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Editions Alecto, March 1979

Inscription

below image: 6/150 / Tom Phillips

GAC number

14465