A magazine illustrator early in his career for McCalls and Ladies Home Journal, Samuel George Phillips later devoted himself to portraiture and landscape painting as part of the Pennsylvania Impressionist School, artists who painted in Bucks County after 1915 and were much influenced by Daniel Garber. Of this group, it was written that the earlier Bucks County/New Hope style of Impressionism had been diluted by modernist influences and that "Generally these painters were not as original or creative as the earlier painters, and in fact their work was highly derivative of the art that preceded them in Bucks County." (Folk 31)

However, Phillips, a student of Garber's at the Pennsylvania Academy, ...