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R. PHILIP HERMOGENES CALDERON was born at Poitiers, his father being the Rev. Juan Calderon, and received his artistic education chiefly in the atélier of M. Picot, at Paris, where he was a student at the age at which he is represented in the first portrait of this series.

At the age of twenty he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy, his first picture being By Babylon's Waters. At thirty-one—which is the age at which the second of our portraits represents him—he was elected A.R.A., his promotion to the honour of R.A. following only three years later, in 1867, in which year he received at the Paris International Exhibition the first medal awarded to any English painter. In 1878 he was one of the English artists selected to exhibit an extra number of works at the Paris Exhibition of that year, and at the close of the Exhibition received again a first-class medal and was created a Knight of the Legion of Honour. Since that time he has always been fully represented at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy, his works covering almost every department of painting, whether portrait, realistic, historical, or imaginative.