Anthony Palliser is a painter. He has lived in Paris since leaving university in 1971. He studied in England at Downside school and graduated from New College Oxford. In 1967 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
From 1995 to 1997 he taught as visiting professor at the New York School of Visual Arts in Savannah, Georgia. He remains a frequent visitor to Savannah and Charleston, SC. where the unique landscapes of the low-country remain a constant source of inspiration.
To date Palliser has had some 26 one-man exhibitions and countless group shows all over Europe and in the USA. His well-known portrait of Graham Greene hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (London) and that of Paddy Ashdown in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. A portrait of the historian Sir Michael Howard was commissioned for the Michael Howard Reading Room at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives in King's College London in 2002. Other portrait subjects include fashion designer Kenzo Takada, celebrated publicist Bobby Zarem, the poet Derek Mahon, director James Ivory and actresses Kristin Scott Thomas and Charlotte Rampling.
He has also embarked on a series of very large paintings of heads. He has asked friends to pose, chosen as much for the diversity of their physical appearance as for the emotion they convey. Some are well-known, others not. The scale (162 x 130cms) allows for a much looser approach pictorially, the ambition being to abandon portraiture as such and be left with painting.
A book of Palliser's collected works published by Editions du Regard in France came out in February 2005. To coincide with its publication, an exhibition of thirteen "Large Heads" was held at the Ricard Foundation in Paris.
A retrospective exhibition was held in 2009 at the Telfair Museum of Art's Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia.
Anthony Palliser was born in 1949 of an English father Michael Palliser and a Belgian mother Marie Marguerite Spaak. He is the grandson of Belgian statesman Paul-Henri Spaak. He is married to Diane Lawyer.
Famous quotes containing the word anthony:
“I’ll wager that it was impossible after we got mixed together to tell an anti from a suffragist by her clothes. There might have been a difference, though, in the expression of the faces and the shape of the heads.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)