British painter and printmaker, born in London, where he studied at Chelsea School of Art, 1956–9, and the *Royal College of Art, 1959–63. In 1963 he began teaching at Chelsea School of Art and in 1965 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery, London. His work has been linked with *Pop art, although when introducing his work in 1964 he invoked, not the currently fashionable mass media theorists, but the Catholic poet and mystic Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, his work shared with artists such as Peter *Blake and David *Hockney a sense that the imagery was ‘in quotation marks’, so undermining the division between abstract and figurative art. The flat colour and black outlines of his painting (in his early work the impersonal surface was achieved by the use of gloss paint on board) were sometimes compared to Roy *Lichtenstein, although the American painter's work was unknown to him when Caulfield first established his style. He took up screenprinting in 1964 and the following year won a prize for graphics at the Paris Biennale. Subsequently print was an important part of his output. An exhibition was devoted to his work at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1981 and another at the Hayward Gallery in 1999. He is recognised asc one of the most important artists of his generation and his works feature in the world's greatest museums and collections.