Born in 1925, Albert Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s alongside the 'Kitchen Sink' painters. Herbert was less interested in the prevailing social realism and was attracted to the truth and emotional significance he found in the paintings of Francis Bacon, whom he met in 1951-52. As 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 a way back to figurative painting through looking at children's art and making primitive, illustrative, figurative etchings.
Sister Wendy Beckett, the writer and art critic who has been a champion of Herbert's work for many years, wrote that his art 'comes from so deep in the psyche that it almost forces itself out'; and that 'Albert Herbert works from vision' and the power of the art comes, not from the story, but from the vision.' Herbert himself always maintained that 'art was about revealing the marvellous' and that 'the inner world is superior to the world of appearances'.