Glyn Philpot (1884-1937)

Philpot studied at the Lambeth School of Art and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904 at the age of nineteen, was elected an ARA in 1915, and became a full Academician in 1923. He was a founder-member of the National Portrait Society in 1911, and was a member of the International Society from 1913. In the same year he was awarded the gold medal at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

Philpot served in the army in the First World War, and in 1918 painted the portraits of four admirals for the Imperial War Museum. During the 1920s he became an extremely successful society portrait painter, painting, among others, Lady Mond, Stanley Baldwin, Oswald Mosley and the King of Egypt. In the early 1930s Philpot had a studio in Paris and, influenced by modern French art, radically changed his style. This proved unpopular with both the public and the art establishment in Britain. His portrait commissions dried up, and in 1933 the Royal Academy rejected his painting The Great God Pan. The National Portrait Gallery staged a major retrospective of his work in 1985.