Who is Peter Blake?

Meet Peter Blake. Do you like his badges?

There are some clues in this self-portrait that tell us about Peter Blake. Which pop star do you think he likes?

Blake is wearing a denim jacket, jeans and baseball boots in his self-portrait. Lots of people wear clothes like that now, but in the early 1960s only young people in Britain dressed like this.

Peter Blake was born in Kent in 1932 and is best known as one of the first pop artists in Britain. In the 1950s he was one of a group of young artists who started to paint pictures and make sculptures about popular culture (or pop culture). They painted things they liked such as films, comic books, and pop music. A lot of these things came from America. (Can you spot an American flag on Peter Blake's jacket?).

This picture is of the Beach Boys, a pop group from California who were very popular in the 1960s. Pop artists also made art about objects that were mass-produced, like Coca-Cola and cornflakes. They wanted to celebrate the things we think of as ordinary and show that they could be art too.

Blake was seen as a radical artist who only painted new things. But actually, his paintings are often quite traditional and were inspired by artists such as Samuel Palmer and William Blake who lived in the 1700s. Many of his artworks were based on, or refer to, classical paintings by British artists such as the Georgian painter Thomas Gainsborough.

In the painting above, On the Balcony 1955–7, he combined pictures of traditional artworks with contemporary American and British popular culture. This picture includes 27 variations on the theme of 'On the Balcony', from a famous painting by a 19th century artist called Edouard Manet to a newspaper photograph of the royal family.