Glyn Philpot: painter and modern pilgrim

This piece was triggered by the Pallant Gallery’s 2022 retrospective show and monograph, Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit, and deploys much of the research behind that blockbuster show and tome. Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was a major figure in his lifetime and a marginal one after it – until the Pallant breathed new life into his reputation. The Pallant gave us Philpot’s variety and variability, but also his constancy and consistency. And his depth. I foreground what I take to be the spiritual quest which I think made his life and work a sort of pilgrimage. It is moot what might be heard of Philpot henceforth. He presents, as he always did, an embarrassment of riches, including some forgiveable embarrassments. Born 140 years ago, he is a superb man for our times, as he was for his own. I hope the future enjoys him and makes him the subject of interesting revisionism.

Comments and corrections will be very welcome.

Contents
Preface
Two late Philpot paintings for openers
Philpots en masse
Philpot’s variety, consistency and variability
Pick-pocket, magpie and Pilgrim
Putting the soul first
Philpot’s life after death
Afterword

Preface

There’s a singular stained glass window in a church in a small West Sussex town. Only people who disparage it would be surprised to find there a work by Walter Crane (1845-1915). The bright stand-alone piece is about A3-sized. It depicts a knight reaching in to pluck a golden crown from a bush. His horse stands by, looking faintly oafish, somehow amused and bored. In Crane’s mind’s eye, this was how Richard III’s crown eventually became Henry VII’s. In my imagination, the knight is me, and the crown is the reputation of Glyn Philpot, the painter (1884-1937). The snary thicket is the problem which Philpot’s complicated oeuvre and life presents.

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Two late Philpot paintings for openers

I’ll begin with two works of the last great Philpot flourishing, from 1933 until his death in 1937. They both live in Sussex. One is a portrait of a fashionable woman, Miss Guendolin Cleaver (1933), which I think I first saw in Brighton, the city which houses it. The other is the portrait of Jamaican Man in Profile (Henry Thomas), 1934-5, owned by Chichester city and hanging in the Pallant Gallery there, where I have often seen it. Guendolin Cleaver draws one in pretty easily. Henry Thomas, not so easily, perhaps. Both are compelling and the latter more obviously troubling.

The Pallant’s director, Simon Martin, Philpot’s latest public devotee and exponent, fills in many of these and other details, some them unknown until his work. The young woman is the painter’s travelling and painting companion on the visits to the French Riviera which have produced the flower and plant pictures which would soon go some way to restoring his bank balance, which he cares more about than he perhaps should. (He is not satisfied by his appetite for luxury – or even for “society”, I think – but they have been and remain constant in his life.) The black Jamaican is Philpot’s friend, model, servant and dependent. Henry is what used to be called a lost soul, even a weaker vessel. People now might use the word “needy”. Some people describe Henry as an “inadequate”. But that misses the extraordinary service which he has done Philpot, and us. Philpot collects such types, whites amongst them, and actually can’t really do without them. They cost him a pretty packet, and consume a good deal of energy (not least expended by his sister Daisy, who has to do a lot of the managing of his various – but now diminishing – households). He and Henry may be a case of co-dependency, or even an abuse of class and cash power relations, but I prefer to think Philpot loves expending his devotion, and he insists he can’t live without the recipients of it, and their reciprocated feeling. His friend Sir Julian Hall, whilst in Campo di Concentramento 78 in 1942, as a prisoner of war, wrote a beautiful “Conjecture” in which he remarks of a Philpot portrait of a Jamaican, “…The eyes of a model? I do not know; but something of Philpot looks out of them, a Philpot who never comes to London, but may not have feared to reveal himself to men who are black”. It is fittingly the last word in Martin’s book.¹

The above are the two pictures by which I first became acquainted with Glyn Philpot. I had accepted him as an under-rated enigma and therefore just the kind of creative I Iike. This state of happy, intrigued ignorance ended in 2022 to be replaced by a vaster panoply of confusions. That year, the Pallant hosted a much bigger retrospective of Philpots than had ever been shown before. Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit was Martin’s gorgeous unwieldy book of this show, which was a blockbuster, but crowded, not mobbed, by its murmurous admirers. ²I was a little stand-offish. I am not good at lapping up modish explanations of what artists are up to, and still less at being herded by curatorial expectations of how I should react. Indeed, I prefer the accounts of Philpot from his contemporaries, as largely retailed in previous biogrpahies of 1986 and 1999.³

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Philpots en masse

Flesh and Spirit displays Philpot’s variety of modes and genres. Naturally, this being modern life, the few offerings which seemed to me a bit silly or worse seemed to be presented as being the high point in the Philpot narratve arc. I am not sure the Pallant got the point of Philpot, or of course, that I have..

Nonetheless, masses of the paintings stood out magnificently. Again, we can start with the work of the last years of Philpot’s life. The flowers and plants, some of them bathed in Mediterranean sun, desertish but lush, were exactly what one wants in nature painting.⁴

They are a relief from human cares but as good a meditational focus as anyone could hope for, looking up from the vacuuming, or across the tea cups. There’s not much room for showing off in plant painting. Amateurs can often do it very well, so a master needs to bring an “A” game to the job, and Philpot does. He had had a tumultuous few years – perhaps had known no other kind. At some point he told Karen Blixen (1885-1962, aka Isak Dinesen) of his longing for refuge. It isn’t sentimental or sloppy to hope and guess that he might have found it, painting in the sun for a market back in grey London, where Syrie Maugham’s shop would soon sell these works to subtly enliven the signature wall-to-wall white which was the decor which became and has remained de rigeur for about 100 years.

I don’t for a moment think the plant paintings were trivial. I much prefer them to many of the other paintings Philpot did in any of his periods or genres including those of his last years. Many, not all, of these seem inept. Indeed, my sort-of hero Henry Thomas features in the strongest and weakest of the many which feature him.⁵

Images of black men were, however, fashionable in the late ’30s London market as they had been in the negrophile Parisian artists’ studios a decade before. Martin tells us that Philpot’s were beginning to sell well, though I don’t suppose that was their paramount attraction to the artist.

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Philpot’s variety, consistency and variability

Amongst the most breathtaking works Philpot ever produced are some late allegorical jobs. Venus and Cupid (1935) is especially fine as is Penelope 1923. But 101st Afternoon with Penelope (1931-32) seems to me as vapid as Philpot gets.⁶

The point which cries out to be re-iterated is that whether he is working with portraits, classical allegory, or in genres such as circus and theatre scenes, and whether they were great or poorish, they all speak to us moderns but are not remotely in any vanguard of Modernism.⁷

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Pick-pocket, magpie and Pilgrim

The medieval-cum-modernity of Glyn Philpot was to the manner born. As a teenager he was impressed by Daniel Gabriel Rosetti and Allgernon Swinburne as many impressionable youngsters were. ⁸He was imbibing the influence of Charles Ricketts, who was the living 20^th Century embodiment of the Anglo-French Aesthetic movement of the mid-19^th Century. Aestheticism as a cult or neo-religion had been pioneered by Swinburne and Baudelaire and they prefigure the self-obsession of the Modernism whose disquiets have been unfolding ever since. In 1903, At 18 Philpot discovers the Louvre. In 1904, and not-quite 20, he is exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show. In 1905 he returned to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, as had Henri Matisse, another wilful person, a decade earlier.

As significantly, Philpot soon went round various Continental capitals to soak up the long history of painting. He took up very old approaches to the surfaces of oil paintings. He abandoned, if he had ever held, his family’s Baptist faith, and became a devout Roman Catholic. This jumble of developments produced the “Modern Old Master” as he was dubbed and who was to become the new young-old kid on the block of society portraitists. A canny contemporary of Philpot’s, the critic Paul Konody, identified Édouard Manet’s influence in some early Philpots. As in important, in time, as reported by Gerald Heard, a vital resource, Philpot was across Huysmans and Proust (see below).

All this matters. Like Walter Sickert, Philpot was a pickpocket of styles. He was also an unmatched magpie of genres. He shared some of Sickert’s tastes, and likewise followed Degas in representing theatrical performance. But he is as much a Frank Brangwyn, or an Eric Gill, or a Stanley Spencer, or a Francis Bacon, or Graham Sutherland in wanting to depict or riff on history and religion.⁹

True to Ricketts and Charles Shannon (the two were a duo), and long before he met them, Philpot determined that the Renaissance was right: Classical and mythological allegory mattered and were as good at expressing modern as ancient truths. ¹⁰Above all, I surmise, he fancied expressing his mind, conscious and unconscious. He also wanted to express his soul, as he felt it to be. It was natural to him to do this in religious and historic genre paintings, and he did a lot of them throughout. To the pick-pocket and magpie, we should add the Pilgrim Philpot. For my money, that was the path Philpot was always on, and on which he deployed all his skills. He wasn’t looking for freedom so much as for his inner being, and he hoped to find it in faithfulness.

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Putting the soul first

Glyn Philpot was some sort of homosexual. But did that orientation define him? We have no idea about his sexual habits. Did he feel guilty about ithem, or thwarted by society, or by his own nature, or indeed anything else? We do know that in the very early 1930s, he let his hair down in a few trips to the relative obscurity of the demi-monde of gay Berlin. Until now, society allowed (actually, it insisted upon) homosexual privacy. I am not sure Philpot has been served well by having these matters waved about ostentatiously.

Anyway, we find him in his mid-40s, a good time for a creative mid-life crisis. He had just been travelling with Henri Matisse and perhaps noticed that the Frenchman, then in his 60s, was also in the throes. Philpot took a studio in Paris, hoping at first to give up painting and concentrate on his sculpture (none of which floats my boat, compared to Eric Gill’s or even Epstein’s). Instead, he painted the religious shockers which have – often in absentia – risked defining him. He reported himself delighted, even ecstatic, that he was in full flow. But we don’t know how he felt about the quality of these works, before, during or after executing them. Some were shown and some refused a showing between 1932 and 1934 at the Royal Academy Summer Show. The Leicester Galleries showed a good few. Some were hidden and others destroyed. I think several of them were pretty poor: too much German Expressionism, too much mucking about on the fringes of sexiness, and too little mark-making of interest.¹¹]

Philpot was not being controversial for the sake of it (he wasn’t that much of a French Aesthete). I am perfectly sure that the new paintings represented a deliberate and important attempt to put mind, body and soul into the worship of God, or into Classical allegories with the same intent. He always thought the whole effort might up-end the market in Philpot.¹²

Actually, beyond having eventually to sell a Sussex country house he had not owned for very long, and a retrenchment in his London studio and living quarters, plenty remained the same. Whether he was chastened by the shockers brouhaha, or pleased that he was now “out there” in some way, life rolled on, in him and around him. He was still in demand for art-powerhouse committee work, still exhibited at the Royal Academy, was still the friend of distinguished people. And he was still looking after his dependent male friends. All in all, Gibson noted, Philpot’s last years were remarkably happy, even allowing for financial worries – and the failing health which would very soon, and suddenly, kill him.

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Philpot’s life after death

After his fatal heart attack in 1937, Philpot’s church gave him a High Mass in Westminster Cathedral. Within days of his death, one of Philpot’s closest friends, the painter Vivian Forbes, killed himself within days, unwilling to face the future without him.¹³

The Times gave Philpot an obituary, of course, and an anonymous friend, probably David Lindsay, an arts heavyweight, added to it in very personal praise of him. Philpot was celebrated posthumously by the Royal Academy that summer, and memorialised by a Tate Gallery retrospective the next year. Henry Thomas wrote heart-brokenly of his dead friend and lasted for ten more years, probably with great difficulty.

Philpot was a difficult figure to pigeonhole and it was remarked of him, shrewdly but cruelly, by the Ashmoloean’s Kenneth Garlick that he “never quite found a style”. Actually, he found too many for his reputation’s convenience. The market in fame does not rate those who won’t or can’t create a brand and stick with it.

Massed Philpots have sometimes re-surfaced. Dogged aficionados mounted retrospectives, not only the Tate’s, but the Ashmolean’s (1951) and the National Portrait Gallery’s (1986), and then the vastly more comprehensive one at the Pallant. There have been three full-scale written accounts of Philpot, including the Pallant’s.

A short memoir of Philpot by the intellectual mystic Gerald Heard, written in around 1945, was discovered in 1999 and published online. It catches Pilgrim Philpot very well, I think. Indeed, Philpot’s story was best told by his contemporaries, and their accounts are kept fresh by his posthumous biographers.¹⁴

That Philpot remains a mystery is no-one’s fault, and certainly not his. That’s just the nature of things.

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Afterword

Apropos my Preface, I can’t say that I have successfully retrieved the Crane-like crown of Philpot’s reputation from the thickets of his temperament, predilections and the many parts of society in which he was at home or not. The whole analogy may be a snare and delusion, since it’s the Philpot thickets which produced the glory and the crown is a bauble compared to them.

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Footnotes

1
The image in question may be the splendid Head of a Jamaican Man, Heroic scale (Henry Thomas) 1937 or the equally fine Balthazar, 1929, also featuring Thomas. BTW: from a thread at ww2talk.com, I learn that Sir – Major – Julian Hall was a Military Intelligence officer who was a prisoner of war in Italy and seems to have escaped on a favoured, difficult mountain route toward Switzerland. After the war, he worked for the BBC and as a critic for The Times. He was membership secretary for the Garrick Club and left another great friend of Philpot’s, Gwen, Lady Melchett, “£20,00 and effects” in his will, as reported by The Times, 24 May, 1974. In his confinement at Sulmona, Abruzzi, or on the run from there, he may have recalled Philpot’s pictures of butch Fascista soldiery as in Italian Soldier No 3 (1922).
2
Throughout this piece I document paintings of interest. Short of buying a copy of the book perhaps the best way of chasing any of these down is to put the titles into a search engine. Wiki certainly has many of the images.
3
See Gibson and Delaney, below in the text and footnoted
4
Of Philpot’s plant painting I am most impressed by Stachys and Leaves, 1934-35 and Garden in Nice (Floodlight) (1933)
5
In an earlier footnote I mentioned a couple I like and add to them now with Seated Jamaican Man (Henry Thomas), 1937. Here are a few I don’t enjoy: Melancholy Man (Henry Thomas), 1936; Harlequin (Henry Thomas),1937 and Seated Model in the Studio (Henry Thomas), 1936; they seem to me awkward and featureless.
6
Philpot’s cross-genre highs and lows: Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse (1935) is pretty good, but Resting Acrobats (1924) seems to me unpleasant to no purpose, even ghoulish, and Weightlifting (1931) is hardly better.
7
As evidence of his stylistic sort-of-modern consistency, here are 30 years’ worth of female portraiture: Portrait in Grey and Rose (portrait of Gladys Miles, later Mrs Randall Davies), 1908; La Zarzarrosa (The Dog Rose), 1910-1911; Miss Isabelle McBirney (1913); The Sisters of the Artist, Daisy Philpot and Gertrude Cross (1922); Mrs Henry Mond (1927); Guendolen Cleaver (1933); Mrs Clement Cross (1934) or his Eva Lutyens (Mrs Robert Lutyens), 1937. The male portraits can have a look-in: A Young Breton (Guillaume Rolland), c1914] and The Morning Prayer (also known as the Watcher on the Roof), 1913, seem ageless, as does Portrait of Vivian Forbes, 1934 (if not quite as strong as the other two.) Philpot’s Self Portrait (1908) strikes a duff note: isn’t it a study in studied self-regard?
8
Vera Bax, my grandmother and a poet and painter certainly was. These excitements are captured by Julian Barnes in his The Man In the Red Coat, Jonathan Cape, 2019, and by William Gaunt in his The Aesthetic Adventure, Jonathan Cape, 1945.
9
Philpot’s Richard I Leaving England for the Crusades, 11 December 1189 (1927) and The Threefold Epiphany (1929) are both Frank Brangwyn-ish. Oedipus, 1931-32 is – as Martin points out – very Epstein-ish, as in the sculptor’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde,(1914). It is the religious intention of Bacon, Spencer and Graham Sutherland more than their styles which is Philpot-ish, I think
10
JGP Delaney wrote his pioneer Charles Ricketts: A Biography, 1990, well before his 1999 biography of Philpot, qv. I am remiss in not having read his Ricketts book yet.
11
Philpot’s St Sebastian (1931-32) was never shown in Philpot’s lifetime; An Ascending Angel (1931) was thought by one critic to be “unwisely bizarre” when it was shown at RA Summer Show in 1932; The Great Pan (1933), was withdrawn from the RA for 1933, shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1934, and eventually destroyed.
12
Philpot’s generally unpopular shockers had some serious fans, including at least one early doubter who came round to them. But they upset or didn’t please some pretty open-minded admirers of Philpot. These included Randolph Schwabe, a refined, modest, well-informed critic and artist of wide sensibilities. He noted in his 1941 diary that the quite Modernist Paul Nash had reportedly disparaged Philpot and [Charles Sargeant] Jagger, working on the Mond/Melchett London house in the early 1930s, as “a pair of charlatans”. In a 1932 entry, Schwabe himself thought there were “a fine work by Sickert and some stupid things by Philpot” in the Royal Academy Summer Show of that year. Source: The Diaries of Randolph Schwabe, British Art 1930-48, 2016, edited by Gill Clarke, published by Sansom & Co, 2016. From the same publisher, her biography, Randolph Schwabe, 2012, demonstrates that at least some of the artistic tastes of Schwabe and Philpot overlapped. Robin Gibson, one of Philpot’s main biographers, and the curator of a Philpot 1986 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, was uneasy about some of the more “aggressive” of what I call the shockers, which he found “slightly alarming”.]
13
Improbably, Philpot and Forbes are re-united in the large paintings they each produced for Edwin Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, completed in 1929. Philpot’s The Creation of Man (1930) and Forbes’s Invention of the Printing Press (1930) hang over the Library’s fireplaces in what is now the Presidential Palace (Rashtrapati Bhavan). See: https://www.rashtrapatibhavan.gov.in/library My grandfather’s handiwork may be (or may not) be found in the plasterwork of the room. I intend a post on all that.
14
Much of the flavor of the best earlier writing about Philpot is to be found in Alan Hollingshurst’s Introduction to the Pallant’s Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit. (I disagree with some of the novelist’s account at the Tate Gallery’s website of Philpot’s The Repose on the Flight into Egypt, 1922. The painting is lovely, and rich in allegory, but isn’t its not-quite depiction of genitalia a stupidly coy distraction?

The most comprehensive accounts of Philpot are from Robin Gibson, curator of the 1986 NPG show, with his: Glyn Philpot, 1884-1937: Edwardian Aesthete to Thirties Modernist, NPG publications, 1986; and JG Paul Delaney, Glyn Philpot: His Life and Art, Ashgate, 1999. (The Gibson is available at Internet Archive.) After publishing his book on Philpot, Delaney came across an invaluable text which online became Memoir of Glyn Philpot (c1945) by Gerald Heard. Edited and with an Introduction by Delaney, it speaks of Philpot’s spiritual quest. The Heard Memoir and Delaney’s Introduction are available at geraldheard.com. Robin Gibson writes an account of the “perceptive” introduction by Kenneth Garlick to the 1976 Ashmoloean Philpot retrospective which Garlick curated. Garlick, as noted in my text, gently probes the reputational difficulties posed by an artist who “never quite found an individual style”. He is also good on the spiritual dimension in Philpot. The Garlick-via-Gibson piece is in “Glyn Philpot, RA, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,” in Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions, The Burlington Magazine, November 1976. See this at https://www.jstor.org/stable/878604.

I have not yet tracked down the work of AC Sewter on Philpot (published by Batsford, 1951), cited in most if not all other major accounts.

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12 October 2024

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