Albert Herbert is known for his seemingly naïve yet sophisticated figurative paintings of Biblical subjects with a literary and poetic sensibility. Herbert served in the infantry during World War II, and after the War studied at Wimbledon School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

He worked alongside the social-realist "kitchen sink" painters at the RCA, but wanted to make more emotive, symbolic paintings with universal narratives. In the 1960s and '70s and when he became Principal Lecturer at St Martin's School of Art in London, Herbert experimented briefly with abstraction, but found his way back to figurative painting through looking at children's art and making primitive, illustrative, ...