Philip Wolfhagen is, quintessentially, a painter of the Australian landscape, one whose work has been exclusively absorbed into his private obsession with Tasmania, the terrain of his personal origins. His work is physical, dense in its application, sombre in mood and tonality, the result of a deeply experienced, enduring engagement with an ancient, yet eternally living subject.

While Philip Wolfhagen’s work only came to the attention of Australian critics and collectors in the early 1990s, he is already regarded as one of Australia’s most outstanding landscape painters. Writing in the catalogue for his 2004 solo exhibtion, art critic Peter Timms said: 'It is, I think, the real daring of Philip Wolfhagen’s atmospheric essays on the agricultural northern Midlands area, where he lives, that they complicate our emotional and intellectual responses to pastoralism, cutting through the rhetoric of both environmentalists and farmers, while cheerfully snubbing the snow-capped-mountain clichés of the tourist industry … These are paintings not only about the love of nature but the nature of love.'