His mother remembers him returning to London with a sack of horse bones from the First World War, but more significantly he bought himself a piano and started to teach himself to play.

He attended life-drawing classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, acted in plays, and designed and illustrated the Isis magazine.

He also attended evening classes in life drawing, under Frank Auerbach, and sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts, where he became a full-time student in 1961.

After a period as a visiting tutor at the Art School in Kassel, Germany, he abandoned teaching and took his first trip to Africa.

This was also the year that he met Marvin and Ruth Sackner, who were to become his patrons and found an archive in Miami to house most of his work.

At the beginning of the 1980s he designed a series of tapestries for his old Oxford college and he returned to portraiture with a portrait of Pella Erskine-Tulloch (the bookbinder who bound Phillips' favourite version of A Humument in three volumes).

His private limited edition of his own translation of Dante's Inferno illustrated with his prints was published in 1983 and in 1984 he was elected a Royal Academician.

[4] Peter Greenaway and Phillips co-directed A TV Dante with John Gielgud and Bob Peck, which was broadcast on Channel 4 television in 1986.

During this time he also collaborated with Malcolm Bradbury, Adrian Mitchell, Jake Auerbach, Richard Minsky and Heather McHugh.

In 1994 he went to Harvard as Artist in Residence at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and published Merely Connect, which he had written with Salman Rushdie during a series of portrait sittings.

In 1998 Largo Records released Six of Hearts, a CD of Phillips' songs and other music written since 1992 but this went out of print when the label failed in 2002.

Antony Gormley, whose workshop adjoins Phillips' studio in Bellenden Road, Peckham, designed bollards for the same project and the work of both artists adorns that street.

[1] Phillips was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the Arts in the 2002 Queen's Birthday Honours list.

One day, Phillips went to a bookseller's with the express intention of buying a cheap book to use as the basis of an art project.

He randomly purchased a novel called A Human Document by Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages.

[2] Phillips used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material) in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of Dante's Inferno (published in 1985).

He collaborated with film director Peter Greenaway on A TV Dante, a television miniseries adaptation of the first eight cantos of the Inferno.

Phillips provided cover art for music albums including Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson (1974), Another Green World by Brian Eno (1975), and one of the 16 portraits that form Peter Blake's design for Face Dances by The Who (1981).