Albert Herbert was born on 10 September 1925. He spent his childhood in Forest Gate, East London. His ‘inseparable’ childhood friend was Bryan Forbes, later the actor and film director. They met aged eight, and discovered the world of art and literature together, a world completely unknown to their parents. After leaving school, Herbert worked in the picture library of the News Chronicle; and thoroughly enjoyed Soho, where he would visit Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery and bookshop, or wander nearby to the National Gallery. During an air-raid early in the Second World War, he saw reproductions of drawings by Len Lye in a Surrealist art magazine – and arrived at the conclusion that ‘art was about revealing the marvellous’. He enrolled in evening classes at the St Martin’s School, where he was taught by Vivian Pitchforth. He would travel home on the blacked-out bus and train, thinking about how he ‘had totally fallen in love with art and wanted to study full-time which seemed then quite impossible.’ His adolescence ended in 1943 with his call-up. He served with the 2nd Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and took part in the second wave of the Normandy Landings. That battalion sustained substantial casualties, as it fought its way across France. As a result of having been surrounded by death and carnage on a  daily basis, but spared its physical consequences, Herbert was vouchsafed a religious experience which would set him apart from his fellow man when he returned from the war. He was ‘liberated’ by Forbes, who recruited him as a designer for ‘Stars in Battledress’, which ran entertainment for the troops. Upon demob in 1947, Herbert obtained a grant to attend Wimbledon School of Art, from which he won a scholarship to the RCA. There, he studied alongside John Bratby, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith and Derrick Greaves, the so-called ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters. He was however powerfully drawn to the truth and emotional significance he found in the work of Francis Bacon, whom he encountered when Bacon was working in a studio there. In 1951 Herbert married his fellow student, the sculptor Jacqueline Henly, and in the following year they went on a travel grant to Spain and Paris, followed in 1953 by a scholarship to the British School in Rome. There Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow were also studying, and the Herberts’ meeting with Renato Guttuso was to have an effect on the work of them both. Herbert’s work became increasingly introspective, more about states of mind than about the world around him. He always used stories as a way of explaining his subjective feelings. His universal narratives were drawn from a myriad of sources, including Biblical stories and his own life experiences. In the late 1950s he was strongly drawn to religion, seeing it as a way of exposing the inner world of the collective mind and converted to Roman Catholicism. In the 1980s his work evolved to incorporate Biblical and theological subjects as a way of making his paintings less private. The surface meanings were often a mask for something else – used as metaphors, universal symbols or archetypes, which could be interpreted in different ways. Fiercely independent in his subject matter and pursuit of his own vision, he usually started a painting with ‘some idea that could be put into words’, although he also often said that ‘art is not about meanings but feelings’. When he was Principal Lecturer at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1960s and ‘70s, Herbert for a time gave up painting in a representational way, repressing his drive to make images that tell stories. Finding abstraction too restrictive, he eventually found his way back to figurative painting. As a teacher, he rapidly got a reputation for being kindly but firm, and never seeking to impose his particular way of seeing and rendering things on his pupils. Herbert is recorded as saying: ‘at a certain age you realise what you are and there’s nothing you can do about it. . . I just am religious. It’s not rational, but if I try to reject or repress it, I have a sense of loss.’ Over five decades, he consistently painted surprising and dream-like images that were the product of an unusual and highly individual imagination. His seemingly naïve yet sophisticated paintings were the result of his life-long journey exploring ‘what lies beneath the surface of the mind.’ He was on a life-long search for ‘the marvellous’ which began with a youthful encounter with Surrealism. He utilised recurrent themes in his work, with both Moses and the burning bush strongly featuring. Herbert constantly renewed and re-invented himself as he explored his inner world, working until just before his death on 10 May 2008. Although of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ generation’ his spiritual vision was undoubtedly closer to that of William Blake and Cecil Collins.