Growing up, the artist Phyllida Barlow, who has died aged 78, was warned by her mother against trading on her illustrious ancestry. Her father’s family tree was decked with Huxleys and Wedgwoods, but it was another of his forebears that her mother had particularly in mind. Barlow was the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
“In the 1960s, when I went to Chelsea College of Art, there was quite a socialist approach,” Barlow mildly recalled. “Anything that smacked of privilege was more of a hindrance than a thing to be bragged about. I became rather inhibited by the association.” It was an inhibition that was to shape her as a sculptor.
