Philip Morsberger was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1933.  His formal art education began at thirteen as a scholarship student at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  He earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon in 1956 and a CFA with distinction in 1958 from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art where, just over a decade later, he was appointed Ruskin Master.  Morsberger chaired Oxford’s art school from 1971-1984, championing its transition from a certificate program to a full degree-granting department within Oxford University.  Over the course of his career, he held influential teaching positions on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring generations of artists.  In the United States, Morsberger’s teaching appointments included Miami University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, the University of California at Berkeley, and California College of Arts where he was the President’s Fellow in Painting and Drawing.  In 1996 he was appointed Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta University, a position he held until retiring as Emeritus Professor in 2001.  He and his wife, Mary Ann, remained in Augusta where Morsberger continued to make art “merely every day” until the last week of his life.  

Morsberger’s work is included in the permanent collections of many museums, including Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, The Butler Institute of American Art; the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Morris Museum of Art.  His work was exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.  Morsberger was the subject of the 2007 book, Philip Morsberger: A Passion for Painting by Christopher Lloyd, J. Richard Gruber’s Philip Morsberger: Paintings and Drawings from the Sixties (2000), and Marcia Tanner’s Philip Morsberger (1992).  He is included in Susan Landauer’s The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration (2000) and Jerry Siegel’s Facing South: Portraits of Southern Artists (2012).  At the time of his death, Morsberger was represented by the Harmon-Meek Gallery (Naples, Florida), Greg Thompson Gallery (Little Rock Arkansas), Valley House Gallery (Dallas, Texas), Hampton III Gallery (Taylors, South Carolina); Out of the Box Fine Arts (Augusta, GA), and IfArt Gallery (Columbia, South Carolina).