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Anthony Palliser was born in 1949 of an English father and a Belgian mother. He studied at Downside school and graduated from New College Oxford. In 1967 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In 1970 he settled in Paris where he still lives and works. 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 he has had 26 one-man exhibitions and countless group shows all over Europe and in the USA. His highly acclaimed 1996 show "Performers" at Lincoln Center in New York showed his enthusiasm for the theatre and cinema. His well-known portrait of Graham Greene hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London and that of Paddy Ashdown in the House of Commons. His most recent commissions included portraits of the philanthropist Alberto Vilar for the Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, and of the eminent historian Sir Michael Howard for King’s College, London. He has also recently completed portraits of Kenzo, the poet Derek Mahon, director James Ivory and celebrated publicist Bobby Zarem.

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 one-man show has just been held at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah,GA

The exhibition of 48 paintings now moves to the Besharat gallery in Atlanta,GA. and opens March 21st 2009.

"Many of Palliser's still lives are like no other still lives I can recall...I have the impression that a portrait by him will seldom be merely a portrait- it will be a painting that contains a portrait." Graham Greene

"There is a feeling for sacred objects in Anthony Palliser's paintings which shows in his portraits and figure studies as well as in still lives." Stephen Spender

“The model who searches the artist’s creation for the unfathomable secret of the self is toying with inner peril. Palliser’s portrait is a penetrating glance at the heart of that secret.” James Lord Man Alone

"The ambition of painting Thought is probably as vain an enterprise as the aspiration to paint Time, but when Anthony Palliser decided to throw open the shutters of his atelier and leave it in the safekeeping of his beautifully-realised human and material objects, he found an obliging accomplice in the wrinkles of Nature and the necessary, criss-crossing place of humans...within those elusive folds of earth and sky." Christopher Hitchens

"Palliser's paintings are given to a sensual, erotic romanticism unlike much of our contemporary painting, British or otherwise. It is not so much that he has kept himself  from the various streams and contemporary currents of painting in the past two decades but that he has kept with a kind of aesthetic faith whose tenets suppose a belief in the materiality of mysteries." Frederic Tuten

“We do not need to know anything about any of the people Palliser paints in order to understand their essential humanity, to divine the spirit within them. Palliser has created a cumulative “portrait” of the living planet around him, its geographic surfaces as well as its inhabitants, its wide habits and varied habitants, rather than portraits of just individual images, specific faces.” Adrian Dannatt

" The portrait is disappearing now, wrote Yves Bonnnefoy in 1991, a bad sign for the future. The portrait hasn't disappeared, any more than the landscape, but it would indeed be a bad sign if it did. It would mean we had lost interest in the unique human life with its unique vision, such a vision as is celebrated here with devotion and skill of the first magnitude."

Derek Mahon