Glyn Philpot

the long version

"Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was a portrait, figure and still-life painter and a sculptor. One of the most financially successful portrait painters of his generation, he achieved early prominence in both Britain and America. Philpot was a senior public figure who embodied deep personal contradictions. In 1933, at the age of 49, he submitted The Great Pan to the Royal Academy. The painting made explicit what had for so long been a coded language within homosexual writing and art and the artist suffered the ignominy of official rejection." "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, these 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 models, friends, lovers and black servants, show the gradual public expression of his homosexuality. In this account of an artist whose career bridged the transition between Edwardian aestheticism and international modernism, Paul Delaney has skilfully brought together disparate elements to reveal the personal, social and artistic crises that transformed Glyn Philpot's work."--BOOK JACKET.