Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/794

758 P H I P H I with these that he first manifested his artistic individuality and finally displayed his full powers. In the Letter- writer, commissioned by the Queen at the suggestion of Sir Edwin Landseer, who had been greatly impressed by some of Phillip s Spanish sketches, we see the change of method in its initial stages rather than in its complete triumph. The artist is struggling with new difficulties in the portrayal of unwonted splendours of colour and light, the draperies are somewhat crude and textureless, and the picture may justly be charged with a want of complete harmony and of a due sense of the finer gradations of nature. In 1857 Phillip was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1859 a full member. In 1855 and in 1860 other two visits to Spain were made, and in each case the painter returned with fresh materials to be embodied with increasing power and subtlety in the long series of works with which his name is exclusively associated in the popular mind, and which has won for him the title of " Spanish Phillip." His highest point of execution is probably reached in the La Gloria of 1864 and a smaller single -figure painting of the same period entitled El Cigarillo. These Spanish subjects were varied in 1860 by a rendering of the Marriage of the Princess Royal with the Crown Prince of Germany, executed by command of the Queen, and in 1863 by a picture of the House of Commons, subjects presenting extreme artistic difficulties, but treated with much skill and dexterity. During his last visit to Spain Phillip occupied himself in a careful study of the art of Velazquez, and the copies which he made after that artist fetched large prices after his death, examples having been secured by the Royal and the Royal Scottish Academies. The year before his death he visited Italy and devoted much attention to the works of Titian. The results of this study of the old masters are visible in such of Phillip s Avorks as La Loteria Nacional, left uncompleted at his death. This and several other of his later works exhibit symptoms of a fresh change of method, and show signs that his art was again about to take a fresh departure. During this period he resided much in the Highlands, and seemed to be returning to his first love for Scottish subjects, painting several national scenes, and planning others that were never completed. His health had been always delicate, and his strength had been taxed by severe domestic affliction and by the very exceptional rapidity and quantity of his artistic production. In the end of 1866 his excessive application to work for the next year s exhibition induced an attack of bilious fever, which was succeeded by paralysis, and the genial and talented artist expired at London on 27th February 1867 at the age of fifty. In execution Phillip was singularly direct, forcible, and rapid. He was a noble colourist, a painter in the first and simplest sense of the word, concerning himself mainly with the visible and sen suous beauties of his subjects, their purely artistic problems of colour, tone, lighting, and texture. His art dealt with the appear ances of tilings, a sufficiently legitimate sphere for the painter, and was seldom permeated with any very deep human or dramatic in terest. His works were collected in the International Exhibition of 1873, and many of them have been excellently reproduced by the engravings of T. Oldham Barlow. In addition to the paintings which we have already specified the following are among the more important: Life among the Gipsies of Seville (1853), El I aseo (1855), Collection of the Offertory in a Scotch Kirk (1855), a Gipsy Water-carrier in Seville (1855), the Prayer of Faith shall save the Sick (1856), the Dying Contrabandist (1856), the Prison Window (1857), a Huff (1859), Early Career of Murillo (1865), a Chat round the Brasero (1866). PHILLIPS, JOHN (1800-1874), one of the foremost of the early geologists of England, was born 25th December 1800 at Marclen in Wiltshire. His father belonged to an old Welsh family, but settled in England as an officer of excise and married the sister of William Smith, the " Father of English Geology." Both parents dying when he was a child, Phillips passed into the care of his uncle. Before his tenth year he had attended four schools, until he entered the old school at Holt Spa, Wiltshire, where he remained for five years, gaining among other acquisitions that taste for classical learning which remained one of his distinguishing traits to the end. From school he went to the house of the Rev. B. Richardson, an accomplished naturalist, in whose charge he remained a year, and from whom he obtained not only much knowledge but the strong bent towards the study of nature which thenceforth became the master-pursuit of his life. His uncle, " Strata Smith," at that time lived in London, where he exercised the profession of a civil and mining engineer, though a very large part of his time and earnings was given to the preparation of those maps of England and the English counties on which his fame now rests. In his zeal for geological pursuits Smith often neglected his proper pro fessional work, until, as his nephew said, "he had thrown into the gulf of the Strata all his patrimony and all his little gains." Eventually he gave up his London house and wandered about the country, as the requirements of his maps led him. From the time that young Phillips joined his uncle in London he remained constantly with him, sharing in every piece of professional work, in the preparation of every book and map, and in every tour for fresh geological information. A youth so trained could not fail to become a geologist. In the spring of 1824 Smith went to York to deliver a course of lectures on geology, and his nephew accompanied him. This was the starting-point in PhUlips s career. His extensive knowledge of natural science and especially of fossils was now turned to account. He accepted engagements in the principal Yorkshire towns to arrange their museums and give courses of lectures on the collections contained therein. York became his residence, where he obtained the situation of keeper of the Yorkshire Museum and secretary of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. From that centre he ex tended his operations to other towns beyond the county ; and in 1831 he included University College, London, in the sphere of his activity. In that year the British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded at York, and Phillips was one of the active minds who organized its machinery. He became the assistant general secretary, a post of great labour and proportionate use fulness, which he held for upwards of thirty years. In 1834 he accepted the professorship of geology at King s College, London, but retained his post at York, coming up to London every year to give a course of lectures there. This arrangement lasted for six years, until, in 1840, he resigned his charge of the York Museum and was appointed one of the staff of the Geological Survey of Great Britain under De la Beche. In this connexion he spent some time in studying the Palaeozoic fossils of Devon, Cornwall, and west Somerset, of which he published descriptions and illustrations. Thereafter he made a detailed survey of the region of the Malvern Hills, of which he prepared the elaborate account that appears in vol. ii. of the Memoirs of the Survey. His direct connexion with the National Survey was but of short duration, for in 1844 he accepted the professorship of geology in the university of Dublin. Nine years later, on the death of Strickland, who had acted as substitute for Dr Buckland in the readership of geology in the university of Oxford, Phillips succeeded to the post of deputy, and eventually, at the dean s death, became himself reader, a post singularly congenial to him, and which he held up to the time of his own death, which was almost tragic in its suddenness. He dined at All Souls College on 23d April 1874, but in retiring slipped and fell headlong down a flight of stairs. Paralysis at once ensued, and he expired on the afternoou