Anthony Palliser was born in 1949, of an English father and a Belgian mother. He trained as an artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, before moving to Paris in 1970, where he still lives to this day. During the 1990’s he was visiting professor of fine art at the New York School of Visual Arts in Savannah, Georgia, a city that he still visits frequently.
As an artist, Anthony has exhibited extensively, with over twenty eight solo exhibitions and countless group exhibitions, throughout Europe and the United States. As a portrait painter, he is highly sought after, and one of his most famous portraits, that of the writer, Graham Greene now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has also completed numerous portrait paintings of well-known people from the world of arts and music including the singer, Marianne Faithful, film directors, James Ivory and John Boorman, and actors, Helena Bonham-Carter, Kristin Scott Thomas and Pierce Brosnan.
Anthony has always had a long standing connection to Ireland, having met the well-known patron of Irish arts, and member of the extended Guinness family, Garech de Brún in France. In subsequent years, he became a frequent visitor to Luggala, the estate in the Wicklow mountains, which de Brún inherited from his mother. It was with the encouragement of de Brún, that Anthony embarked on painting a series of portraits of Irish poets and writers, such as John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Colm Toíbín and Derek Mahon.
In more recent years, he has invited friends to pose for him, and produced a series of very large scale portraits, where the canvas is dominated by the face of the sitter, often seen from the front, looking directly at the viewer. In this series of paintings, the direct gaze and imposing size of the canvas is in marked contrast to the sense of intimacy, that is an inherent element of Anthony’s portrait paintings.
As an artist, Anthony has exhibited extensively, with over twenty eight solo exhibitions and countless group exhibitions, throughout Europe and the United States. As a portrait painter, he is highly sought after, and one of his most famous portraits, that of the writer, Graham Greene now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has also completed numerous portrait paintings of well-known people from the world of arts and music including the singer, Marianne Faithful, film directors, James Ivory and John Boorman, and actors, Helena Bonham-Carter, Kristin Scott Thomas and Pierce Brosnan.
Anthony has always had a long standing connection to Ireland, having met the well-known patron of Irish arts, and member of the extended Guinness family, Garech de Brún in France. In subsequent years, he became a frequent visitor to Luggala, the estate in the Wicklow mountains, which de Brún inherited from his mother. It was with the encouragement of de Brún, that Anthony embarked on painting a series of portraits of Irish poets and writers, such as John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Colm Toíbín and Derek Mahon.
In more recent years, he has invited friends to pose for him, and produced a series of very large scale portraits, where the canvas is dominated by the face of the sitter, often seen from the front, looking directly at the viewer. In this series of paintings, the direct gaze and imposing size of the canvas is in marked contrast to the sense of intimacy, that is an inherent element of Anthony’s portrait paintings.
