PHILLIP, John (1817-1867), subject and portrait painter, was born at Aberdeen, Scotland, on 19 th April 1817. His father, an old soldier, was in humble circumstances, and the son became an errand-boy to a tinsmith of the place, and was then apprenticed to a painter and glazier. Meanwhile he was employing in the pursuit of art all the time he could spare from his daily duties, and, having received some technical instruction from a local artist named William Mercer, he began, at the age of about fifteen, to paint portraits. In 1834 he was enabled to make a very brief visit to London, where he studied with delighted interest in the Royal Academy Exhibition and the National Gallery. At this time, or shortly afterwards, he became assistant to James Forbes, an Aberdeen portrait-painter, under whose tuition he made considerable progress. Previously, however, he had gained a valuable patron. Having been sent to repair a window in the house of Major P. L. Gordon, his interest in the works of art which hung on the walls attracted the attention of their owner. He brought the young artist under the notice of Lord Panmure, who bought several of his productions, and in 1836 sent the lad to London, promising to bear the cost of his art-education. At first Phillip was placed under T. Μ. Joy, but he soon entered the schools of the Royal Academy, where he worked diligently, but with no exceptional promise or success, for two years. In 1839 he figured for the first time in the Royal Academy Exhibition with a portrait and a landscape, and in the following year he was represented by a more ambitious figure-picture of Tasso in Disguise relating his Persecutions to his Sister. For the next ten years he supported himself mainly by portraiture and by painting subjects of national incident, ...

PHILLIPS, John (1800-1874), one of the foremost of the early geologists of England, was born 25th December 1800 at Marden 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 professional 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 ...