Biographies

Glyn Warren Philpot (1884 – 1937) The painter and sculptor Glyn Philpot was born in London and studied at the Lambeth School of Art from 1900. He was the youngest of four children of John Philpot, a chartered surveyor, and Jessie Carpenter Philpot. His mother died when he was seven and his father married his first wife’s half-sister, Julia. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1904, and in 1905 went to Paris to study under J. P. Laurens. In 1911 Glyn Philpot met the artists and . Through them he met Robert Ross who was to be helpful in obtaining commissions.In 1917 Robert Ross introduced Glyn Philpot to Siegfried Sassoon who was convalescing after being wounded and in France, and Philpot painted his portrait. He also painted portraits of Oswald Mosley and Stanley Baldwin. However, he exhibited most flare when painting portraits of black men which he did throughout his life. One of the best-known black models was Henry Thomas who was also Glyn Philpot’s manservant for several years. Charles Ricketts Charles Shannon From the blurb for Delaney’s recent biography: The young Glyn Philpot circulated in the close company of the Edwardian aesthetes. Portraits financed his more committed work on subject pictures. In the Symbolist tradition, they reflect his deepest concerns: religious themes reveal a profound knowledge of his adopted Catholicism, while an increasing interest in the male nude and a series of superb portraits of young men, his black servants, models, friends and lovers, show the gradual public expression of his homosexuality. The tensions between his public and personal lives led Philpot to spend long periods outside Britain. In 1931, he visited Berlin. His encounter with that city’s homosexual underworld had a profound spiritual and emotional effect and Philpot adopted a new style which owed much to international modernism. In the March 3, 1910 number of , Huntly Carter praised “the very assertive and sensational work of Glyn Philpot, especially his ‘Manuelita’ and ‘Mervyn Herapath’.” The New Age (NA 6.18:428)