The art of Glyn Warren Philpot

G.W. Philpot was a prodigy, accepted as the youngest member of the Royal Academy of painters, sculptors, and gravers of his generation.  He made a comfortable living as a portraitist before the Great War and up until his death at 53 in 1937.  He has been largely forgotten probably due to the fact that his portraits are mostly held privately in the surviving country houses of Britain, but also for the fact he painted the demimonde and fashionable during the inter-war period.  When Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, the whole of that garden party era was swept away.

He studied Velázquez and Manet, and the moody darkness and light touch is evident in some of the portraits seen above.  He broke from that more mannered style in 1930 and embraced a modernist approach which can be seen in the stippled work of the second half of this picture post.

In an era of eugenics and barefaced racism he is said to have given an uncommon dignity to the black models he painted, obvious in the examples I've included here.  His homo-eroticism is evident.  During his lifetime two pictures, The Great Pan and Guardian of the Flame, were withdrawn by the academy as cutting a bit too close to the bone.  He was unusual for an Englishman, having converted to Roman Catholicism in a staunchly Protestant nation.  He also came to accept his homosexuality during a stridently homophobic period where you could be jailed if caught out.

Between 1923 and 1935 he was in a relationship with the painter Vivian Forbes, who can be seen in the above portrait holding a panel and standing beside an easel, before the photographs in the stream of Philpot himself.  Brighton Museum holds a loving cup in its collections inscribed 'from Glyn to Vivian' as witness to their time together.  On the 16th of December, 1937 Philpot suffered a stroke and died.  His funeral took place on December 22nd.  Heartbroken and bereft, Forbes took his own life with sleeping pills the next day.