Biography
Albert Herbert (b. London 1925 - d. 2008) left school early and worked in the picture library of the News Chronicle. He attended evening classes at St Martin's School of Art in London run by the artist Vivian Pitchforth which made him determined to study art full-time. After serving in the army he went to Wimbledon School of Art from 1947-49 when he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art; there he met fellow student and sculptor Jacqueline Henly whom he married in 1951.
An RCA travel grant took them to Spain and Paris in 1952/3 and the award of the Abbey Major Scholarship enabled them to spend the following year at the British School in Rome. His time in Rome fed Herbert's growing interest in Catholicism and the themes and imagery of religious art - which in later years broadened to encompass Buddhism and led him to visit a Zen monastery in South Korea in the 1970s. Biblical and religious subjects were to feature in many of his paintings; the narratives he records are depicted in a quasi-primitive style which, however, have a transcendental quality, conveying a sophisticated reflection upon the desire to reveal "the inner world of the collective mind".
Herbert taught at Dudley College of Art in 1955 and in 1956 he took up a teaching post at Birmingham College of Art and it seems probable that it was at this period that he was living at 7 Adelaide Road, Leamington Spa. He then moved to London for an appointment as Tutor at St Martin's College of Art in 1964, later becoming Principal Lecturer until he retired in 1988.
