Philip was born in Nuneaton on 9 June 1914 , a few months before the start of the Great War, and he would spend his early and formative years in other Midlands towns. Continuing the pattern, Philip's secondary education was in Birmingham (1926-1931), and he was to train at the Central School of Art in that city during and after World War II.

Philip took German, Art and Mathematics for his Higher School Certificate in 1931, and languages and mathematics continued to fascinate him throughout his life. As for art, that would provide the major impetus for his career, and his passion for it would be central to his adult life. Yet a taste for open-air pursuits, hiking and travel, also came with his Midlands background. Walking, climbing hills and playing rugby football were his sports and he played for Birmingham.

Foreign languages, art and music too were in Philip's genes, and hardly dependent on his environment. On his father's side, the family came from Germany , and his grandfather, Otto Friedrich, taught music and languages at Ratcliffe College , near Leicester , when they moved to England , apparently in the 1880s. The family name was Trautmann; indeed, Philip's surname was spelt that way when his birth was registered. His German grandfather had creative gifts in addition to his musical and linguistic skills, and he evidently composed work that established instrumentalists of his day were willing to perform. There was music on Philip's mother's side too. Although his maternal grandfather –John William Barrs- was a highly successful tea merchant, Philip's mother trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music and played at a concert in the Queen's Hall before her marriage and a growing family put a long pause over her potential career. On the art side, moreover, two of Philip's Trautmann aunts drew beautifully, and D.H. Lawrence sat to one of them for a miniature portrait.

There was a war-torn gap in Philip's artistic training between 1940 and 1943, when he suffered all kinds of humiliation as a conscientious objector, including a period of incarceration in Birmingham . His own mixed family background and humanitarian left-wing inclinations no doubt influenced his position. But Quaker attitudes and non-conformist beliefs were also traditionally strong in his part of the country and may have played their part. His resumed his art studies when the war in Europe was over and this, together with the support of friends, will have helped him to overcome the sense of isolation and alienation prison bred.

The post-war world brought employment problems in its train, and although Philip taught art and other subjects at a school in Birmingham for a while in 1946, he clearly felt the need to increase his qualifications and took the University of London matriculation examination and the Intermediate in Arts subjects as an external student at that time. Then he moved to London in 1947 to study for a degree in Art History at the Courtauld Institute, where his Intermediate qualification allowed him to take the BA in two years. Anthony Blunt, the Director, soon recognised his ability, and his art school training gave him a clear advantage over most budding art historians in the accuracy with which he read artistic techniques and his eye for quality. But work prospects were not good at the time; museums were thinly staffed – when were they not? – and Philip did not do himself justice at interviews. Lean years followed, in which he took whatever employment was available, usually unsuitable, its depressing effect attenuated by the fact that he was now married to Mary, a staunch and independent minded friend from Birmingham of many years standing.

Two or three years later he was appointed Librarian of the Teaching Collection of photographs and Keeper of the Sir Robert Witt Collection of Old Master Drawings in 1952. He immediately gave unstinting commitment to studying the Witt drawings and would soon start to organise regular exhibitions, with admirably detailed entries on questions of technique and authorship in their modestly printed catalogues, all too often, apparently, written by some anonymous hand. At this period he overcame the revulsion he felt for the Franco regime and began to make regular trips to Spain , studying the language, sketching some of its monuments, getting to know its people and culture more thoroughly in museums, churches, third class railway carriages and places of refreshment. El Greco, Velázquez and Goya increasingly claimed his attention, and he soon had friendly contacts with contemporary artists too, more particularly in Catalonia .

By 1957 he had begun to give lectures and take tutorial classes with BA (Honours) and diploma students at the Courtauld, where he was now Curator, and his seminars more particularly sparked a fascination with Spanish art in the participants. His deepening knowledge of this field soon led to his writing invaluable catalogue entries for the Goya paintings (other than portraits) in the Goya and his Times winter exhibition at Burlington House (1963), and he wrote attractive and perceptive introductions to Velázquez and El Greco for Paul Hamlyn's Spring Book series in 1963 and 1965. Although he was to use his German expertise in translating Dürer's Sketchbook of his Journey in the Netherlands 1520-21, published in 1968 and reissued with commentaries by Philip for Paul Elek in 1971, he continued to specialise above all on artists from Spain . His selection of paintings, drawings and prints by Goya was published by the Folio Society in 1971, and in the year of his retirement he played a major role, with another distinguished expert on Spanish art and friend of Philip's, Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, in organising and cataloguing a major exhibition of Spanish paintings and drawings from British collections entitled The Golden Age of Spanish Art (Nottingham University Art Gallery, 1980).

There was no falling off in Philip's scholarly output in his retirement. He brought his flair for mathematics and his drawing skills to bear on two works by Velázquez involving mirrors: the Venus and Cupid from the National Gallery and Las Meninas from the Prado. Doubt had been cast by some critics on the way in which the artist had captured reality in these mirrors. Was Venus's mirror in fact angled to capture her face, as opposed to some other part of her anatomy? And did the mirror on the wall in The Maids of Honour reflect the King and Queen themselves rather than the image on the canvas that Velázquez was painting? Philip calculated the angles of incidence and studied the perspective of the two pictures, made endless drawings and finally scale models of the scenes represented. And these were exhibited in the Slade School at University College London , and convincingly made the case that the mirror was indeed at the right angle to show Venus's face to the spectator, and the angle interestingly implied, furthermore, that she was looking at the reflection of someone who had just entered the room behind her. Las Meninas was easier to analyse because it was possible for Philip to exploit scale plans of the room in the Alcázar palace in which the scene depicted was placed. It was not necessary for him to estimate the proportions of the chamber or gauge its dimensions from those of a mythological painting hanging on the wall at the back, as Antonio Buero Vallejo had done to support his own solution to the mirror image problems. Philip's scale model effectively demonstrated that the mirror reflected the painting on which the artist was working as Palomino had maintained - evidently a double portrait of the King and the Queen - and his calculations were based on a far more secure foundation than those of anyone else tackling the same question.

Philip never published the details of his models or his cyclostyled argument in permanent form. He sent the drawings and his findings to the National Gallery and the Prado Museum respectively, and left it at that. The models themselves remain in the safekeeping of University College , but they surely deserve to be known and more readily accessible to the wider public.

The present book makes another great project of Philip's available to those who share his passion for Goya: his translation of the artist's letters and official documents into readable English. He started work on it in the last few years of his life, and it is not surprising that he left this absorbing but often very difficult task with some loose ends that his editor has had to tie. Philip enjoyed pursuing the truth about the art and the life of the Spanish painters he admired: the precise nature of what they were saying with brushes, etching needle, pencils or pen.

Nigel Glendinning