Philip Corbet

Philip's daughter Edith would later write that her father had been ‘intended for the Church‘ but that he was 'so passionately fond of painting that he at last induced his parents to allow him to follow the great mists of his heart, and become a painter’.

He very quickly managed to obtain commissions from much of the societal elites in the area, with Thomas Kenyon of Pradoe Hall, near Oswestry, one notable patron during this early period of his career.

Five of these copies that were later exhibited in Shrewsbury in an exhibition in 1958, when they were listed, with some slight titular alterations, as A Copy of Van Ostade’s Portrait of Paulus Potter, Lady in White Satin (after Gerard ter Borch), Dutch Interior (after Gerard Dou), Dutch Interior (after Pieter de Hooch) and Presentation of Christ in the Temple (after Rembrandt).

Jane and Philip would go on have ten children, which they raised in the Judge's Lodgings, in Shrewsbury's Belmont area, accommodation acquired with the help of his long-time patron Thomas Kenyon.

In the documentation concerning his eventual eviction from the property, it is suggested by Philip's son Rowland that his sight was failing him by this time and that he was unable to practise painting in the manner he previously had.