The rise and fall of Glyn Philpot

In 1999, J. G. P. Delaney’s biography of Glyn Philpot used the ‘H’ word for the first time in writings on this prominent British portraitist, and religious and genre painter. Delaney’s discussion of Philpot’s ‘homosexuality … which contributed important elements to his painting’ was revelatory, and made sense of so much that was clearly adumbrated in Philpot’s art, without ever having been explicitly addressed.¹J. G. P. Delaney, Glyn Philpot. His Life and Art, Ashgate, Aldershot, Hampshire, 1999, p. 4. Handsome, erudite and well connected, Glyn Philpot made a considerable name for himself in the United Kingdom in the 1910s and 1920s as a fashionable society portrait painter. He had the misfortune, however, to live in an era when, as Peter Stansky, biographer of one of Philpot’s early patrons Philip Sassoon, has put it: ‘An unconventional private life, whether hetero- or homosexual, generally did not cause problems as long as it remained resolutely private. Public scandal of any sort would be devastating for a political [or, in Philpot’s case, artistic] career’.²Peter Stansky, Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sibyl, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003, p. 106.

A watershed in Philpot’s career came with his solo show at London’s Leicester Galleries in the summer of 1932, when he unveiled works painted in a brightly coloured quasi-Surrealist modern style that was utterly at odds with the elegant formality of his society portraits. Commissions for these society portraits, the mainstay of his financial security, apparently ‘dried up almost overnight’, Philpot securing only one in 1932, one in 1933 and three in 1934.³Robin Gibson, Glyn Philpot, 1884–1937: Edwardian Aesthete to Thirties Modernist, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1984, p. 29. This has traditionally been ascribed to an adverse reaction on the part of the artist’s conservative clients to his sudden switch to a stridently modernist aesthetic. One cannot help but consider, however, whether the overtly homoerotic nature of many of the works that Philpot displayed in 1932 somehow crossed a line, spilling his private life into the public realm in an unwelcome manner.

It is, of course, understandable that the first short monograph on Philpot’s art, written in 1951 by Albert Charles Sewter, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the United Kingdom, should not have mentioned his sexuality. Perhaps inadvertently, however, Sewter did draw attention to two studies of ‘a model with a broken nose and red hair’, noting ‘the tremendous vitality of this man’, whose ‘curiously ambivalent quality, a contemplative and anxious wonder reaching almost to mystical tenderness, blended with sardonic cruelty and brutality, has an uncanny fascination’.⁴A. C. Sewter, Glyn Philpot 1884–1937, B. T. Batsford, London, 1951, p. 10. Could he have known, one wonders, that these were studies of George Bridgman, one of Philpot’s favourite models, a ruggedly handsome itinerant labourer who drifted in and out of the artist’s life in the 1920s. Bridgman worked occasionally as Philpot’s servant or gardener, but at times he was simply paid a retainer to be the artist’s companion.⁵Delaney, 1999, p. 95. Whether Philpot had a physical relationship with Bridgman is not known, although the artist’s obsession with his rough good looks would seem to suggest that this was desired, if not actualised.

Thanks to Delaney’s biography, we now know that Philpot did take as both lovers and models other servants, such as his chauffeur, Dick Earle; although Delaney wisely cautions that ‘it would be wrong, however, to conclude that he was sleeping with every model or travelling companion’.⁶ibid., p. 98. That Philpot’s homosexuality was an open, if unspoken secret among many in the art world is indicated by the use of his art as a coded signifier of sexual preference in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film of Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer (see below). That it took so long to appear definitively in print, reflects the long struggle for discussion of homosexuality to become mainstream, even within the supposedly more liberal realm of the art world.

The outbreak of world war, two years after Philpot’s untimely death in 1937, and art history’s primary obsession in the postwar years of the 1950s and 1960s with the trajectory of modernism, meant that Philpot’s name disappeared from most accounts of twentieth-century British art, just as his works gradually disappeared from the walls of galleries across the United Kingdom – the irony being that the story of one of Britain’s finest homosexual artists was itself ‘disappeared’ even as British society gradually came to terms with the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which recommended that ‘homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should cease to be criminal offences’; and with the subsequent Sexual Offences Act 1967, which legalised consensual homosexual sex in private between men over the age of twenty-one.⁷The Wolfenden Report. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, Lancer Books, New York, 1964, p. 47.

When an exhibition of Philpot’s work was organised by Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 1976, it brought back to the public eye aspects of his practice that had been invisible for many years. Noting that the exhibition ‘provides a useful opportunity to reassess a painter, who is today almost totally forgotten, having been during his lifetime both brilliantly successful and daringly controversial’, art historian Jeffery Daniels drew attention to ‘his informal portraits, normally of young soldiers or labourers’ (calling one sitter ‘an appealingly depraved-looking youth’), as well as ‘a whole series of paintings, drawings and sculptures of young black males, to whom (like Lady Cunard) he was attached’.⁸Jeffery Daniels, ‘Glyn Philpot’, Art & Artists, vol. 11, no. 8, Nov. 1976, pp. 33, 35, 37, 39. Philpot was fascinated by African and Jamaican sitters, whose portraits he painted and sculpted whenever the opportunity arose. This was unusual at a time when, as historian Barbara Bush has noted: ‘Although the black community in Britain was still very small during the bleak 1930s racial prejudice permeated all levels of white society, reinforced through popular literature, cinema, the content of school curriculums and the patriotic propaganda of Empire Day celebrations’.⁹Barbara Bush, ‘Black people in Britain: the 1930s’, History Today, vol. 31, no. 9, 9 Sep. 1981. A constant in Philpot’s life from 1929 onwards was his Jamaican servant, Henry Thomas, who was both servant and model, and posed for the artist numerous times.

The Ashmolean’s 1976 Philpot show, Daniels admitted, was ‘a relatively small exhibition’, however ‘at least a positive move towards rehabilitating his reputation has been made which may even stimulate curators of museums to put some of his works on show’.¹⁰Daniels, 1976, p. 39. Resistance to reinstating Philpot on gallery walls persisted for a long time, the NGV being criticised as late as 2008 for including ‘no fewer than seven paintings by the meretricious Glyn Philpot’ in its large survey exhibition Modern Britain 1900–1960. Masterworks from Australian and New Zealand Collections.¹¹Patrick McCaughey, ‘Green and unpleasant land’, The Times Literary Supplement, 15 Feb. 2008, p. 22.

In 1984 the first (and still the only) major retrospective of Philpot’s work was organised by Robin Gibson at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The accompanying publication offered as thorough an examination of Philpot’s life and art as was then possible, without mentioning the ‘H’ word. Reading it, one can sense a tension underlying Gibson’s text, in which he discusses Philpot’s ‘fascination with the conflict of morality and sensuality that characterises so many of his later pictures and, one must assume, his personal life’; the artist’s ‘almost passionate friendship’ with his American millionaire patron Robert Allerton; the ‘sensuous good looks and good physique’ of George Bridgman, which ‘seem to have represented an ideal for Philpot’; and his ‘relationship with a young German, Karl Heinz Müller’, all without using the word ‘homosexual’.¹²Robin Gibson, Glyn Philpot, 1984, pp. 13, 16, 21, 27. This first detailed account of Philpot’s personal and professional relationships, in addition to listing the many wealthy socialites and members of the British aristocracy who sat for Philpot during his years of renown as one of his country’s most celebrated portrait painters, was also filled with an enormous cast of men – Vivian Forbes, Oliver Messel, Robert Ross, Philip Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Frank Schuster, Roger Quilter, John Gray and Gerald Heard, as well as of course Allerton and Müller – without mentioning the one thing that they all had in common: homosexuality. For gay men at the time, though, who were used to decoding their tribe’s secret histories, this cast list was a discreetly packaged gift.

Philpot’s first correspondence with the Canadian-born journalist and art critic Robert Ross dates from 1911. Ross today is best known as Oscar Wilde’s first male lover and, later, his literary executor. He was also appointed Felton Adviser to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1917, when he brokered the acquisition for the NGV thirty-six remarkable watercolours by William Blake. It was Ross who in 1908 commissioned Jacob Epstein to create his controversial tomb for Oscar Wilde, which resides today in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Ross’s ashes are in the tomb, along with Wilde’s.¹³Jonathan Fryer, Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s Devoted Friend, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2000, p. 18; Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Basic Books, New York, 2005, pp. 82–4. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, friends and supporters of Oscar Wilde, were one of the great homosexual couples of British art (albeit in their day a relatively discreet and closeted couple). They met at art school in the early 1880s and were to spend the rest of their lives together.¹⁴The relationship between Ricketts and Shannon was complicated by the fact that, alongside their inseparable bond as lifelong partners from the moment they met as teenagers in 1882 until Ricketts’s death in 1931, ‘both also had intense emotional and sexual relationships with other women (chiefly for Shannon) and men (for Ricketts)’. Matt Cook, ‘Domestic passions: unpacking the homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 51, no. 3, Jul. 2012, p. 633. Both were consummate painters and Ricketts was a renowned stage designer, working notably on Oscar Wilde’s Salome in 1906. This was a private production at Covent Garden, Wilde’s Salome being banned from public performance in Britain until 1931. In 1923 Philpot took over a large studio flat in Holland Park that belonged to Shannon and Ricketts, the bond between the three now being marked by the older couple bestowing the nickname ‘Glynpot’ upon their younger friend. The Catholic priest John Gray had also been a former lover of Oscar Wilde, and subsequently formed a life relationship with the French poet and advocate for homosexual liberation, Marc-André Raffalovich. He became a friend and mentor to Philpot after the latter’s conversion to Catholicism.¹⁵David Hilliard, entry on John Gray in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History From Antiquity to World War II, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, pp. 190–1. Patrick Cardon, ‘A homosexual militant at the beginning of the century: Marc André Raffalovich’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 25, nos. 1–2, 1993, pp. 183–91.

When Philpot sent his Head of a negro, 1912–13 (private collection), to the 1913 exhibition of the Modern Society of Portrait Painters, it was purchased by the homosexual politician, society figure and art collector Sir Philip Sassoon. Sir Philip next commissioned Philpot to paint his own portrait, as well as a series of Egyptian-fresco style erotic friezes depicting virile African men for his country estate in Kent. Sassoon’s biographer Peter Stansky records that ‘there is a story that Philip and Philpot spent a frantic day painting shorts on the men before a visit by Queen Mary to Port Lympne on 10 September 1936’.¹⁶Stansky, p. 148. In 1917, Robert Ross introduced Philpot to Siegfried Sassoon, Philip Sassoon’s cousin, who was also homosexual. During the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon had fallen in love with the gifted poet Wilfred Owen, who was tragically killed just before the end of hostilities. Glyn Philpot later took care, as best he could, of Wilfred Owen’s younger brother Harold, who aspired to be an artist.¹⁷John Stuart Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Richard Cohen Books, London, 1999, pp. 63–7; Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886–1918, Routledge, New York, 1999, pp. 370–3. Through Siegfried Sassoon, Philpot met the music patron Frank Schuster, as well as the composer Roger Quilter, leading lights within Britain’s underground homosexual musical world.¹⁸On Frank Schuster, see Michael Kennedy, ‘A new home rich in history: The Spectator’s new building has an inspiring past’, The Spectator, 3 Feb. 2007, pp. 11–12; and Richard Smith, ‘Frank Schuster – Elgar’s Patron’, The Elgar Society Journal, vol. 19, no. 5, Aug. 2016, pp. 4–18. Valerie Langfield, entry on Roger Quilter in Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2021, accessed 30 Jul. 2021; and Valerie Langfield, Roger Quilter: His Life and Music, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002, pp. 21–2. It was apparently while attending the opera at Covent Garden in 1913 that Philpot first met the American millionaire Robert Allerton (who had been in a relationship with Quilter two years previously), who was to become another significant friend and patron, and possibly also an occasional lover.¹⁹Delaney posits as ‘unanswerable’ the ‘question of how far this relationship went’; Delaney, 1999, p. 37. Martha Burgin and Maureen Holtz, Robert Allerton: The Private Man and the Public Gifts, The News-Gazette, Inc., Champaign Illinois, 2009, pp. 52–7. See also Lucinda Fleeson, ‘Robert Allerton: Living well is the best revenge’, Windy City Times, 7 Oct. 2009. Philpot had been introduced to the homosexual historian and philosopher Gerald Heard, in 1915, by the husband of Philpot’s art school friend Gladys Miles, Randall Davies, who was Felton Adviser to the NGV in the 1930s (see below).²⁰J. G. P. Delaney, ‘Gerald Heard’s Memoir of Glyn Philpot c. 1945’, British Art Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, summer 2003, p. 87. Alison Falby, Between the Pigeonholes: Gerald Heard, 1889–1971, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle UK, 2008, p. 9.

For the clued-in, all of this was there in Gibson’s 1984 text without, actually, being there at all. Not surprisingly, little was noted about Philpot’s private life in reviews of Gibson’s retrospective exhibition, although one critic did acknowledge in print the existence of ‘his life-long companion Vivian Forbes’.²¹John Russell Taylor, ‘Major painting discovery of the Deco sensibility’, The Times, 13 Nov. 1984, p. 15. All of these men feature in Delaney’s 1999 biography as well, although, curiously this time, with little mention of their shared homosexuality – perhaps Delaney felt that ‘outing’ Philpot was sufficient. Delaney was able to clarify that Philpot’s physical relationship with Vivian Forbes probably waned as ‘their lives grew more divergent … Still, he remained part of Glyn’s world, for he had few friends of his own’.²²ibid., p. 101. Most intriguingly, Delaney interviewed a man who had a twelve-year sexual relationship with Philpot in the 1920s and 1930s, but who did not want to be identified. Delaney’s ability to finally be open about Philpot’s sexuality in print enabled him to document the artist’s increasing acceptance of his own homosexuality, especially ‘in later years, when his lifestyle and circle of friends became more openly homosexual’.²³ibid., p. 100. By the late 1920s friends had become worried that Glyn Philpot and his art were becoming too indiscreet for comfort. The artist Eliot Hodgkin recalled that: ‘Gerald Heard and others deplored that Glyn was getting out of hand — not hiding his homosexual tastes. He was taking risks, being too obvious’.²⁴Eliot Hodgkin, quoted in ibid., p. 90. Something of this might be inferred from Powys Evans’s caricature of the artist drawn around 1923, in which Philpot appears as an effete gentleman, posed before a naked ‘Adam’ figure proffering an apple (drawn from Philpot’s painting Dawn, 1920, private collection) and holding a phallic-looking nude male sculpture that is positioned over Adam’s groin with lewd intent (Philpot’s own bronze Torso, c. 1912, Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery).²⁵Powys Evans, Caricature of Glyn Philpot c. 1923, pen and black ink, 35.9 x 25.4 cm; Christie’s Interiors (South Kensington, London), Live Auction 7857, 7 Aug. 2012, lot 377. On Powys Evans, there is ‘a paucity of biographical material … There is no record of him marrying, no sign of children, no trace of sexual or financial scandal’. John Jensen, entry on Powys Evans in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 9 May 2018, accessed 31 July 2021. The interpretation of the apple-carrying nude male figure as ‘Adam’ is drawn from Gibson, 1984, p. 134.

As a young man Philpot’s precocious talent had been fostered by sound early training at Lambeth School of Art under Philip Connard, and in Paris in 1905 with the respected history painter Jean-Paul Laurens, which reinforced his innate affinity with both Italian and Spanish Old Master painting. As he developed his skills as a portrait painter, Philpot’s style became increasingly robust, drawing upon his study of Italian Renaissance art, as well as the portraits of Holbein.

In 1912 the critic J. B. Manson argued that:

There has always seemed to me something dandified, something exquisite and precious, about Glyn Philpot’s work, as though he were a sort of Beau Brummel of painting, seeking ever to devise new elegances, to beribbon his work with unheard-of colours, to evolve some subtle perfume which shall attract attention and make his work remarkable among that of his fellows.²⁶B. Manson, ‘The paintings of Glyn W. Philpot’, The Studio, vol. 56, no. 234, Sep. 1912, p. 260.

Responding later in his career to the frequently aired opinion that his own portraits could hang comfortably alongside portraits by the Old Masters, Philpot replied: ‘That was because I built up my pictures with underpainting, as the Old Masters did, and then worked the colour with successive glazes, and then covered the whole thing with a glaze of varnish mixed with ivory black or sienna’.²⁷‘Glyn Philpot, R. A. on his “new manner”. A conversation with R. H. Wilenski’, The Studio, vol. 104, no. 476, Nov. 1932, p. 284. These qualities are evident in the NGV’s Peter Hannen, 1915–16, an early portrait of the seven-year-old son of Philpot’s actor friend Nicholas Hannen.

In 1923 art critic P. G. Konody, noted how: ‘In the past [Philpot] used the sumptuous palette of Paolo Veronese and Titian. Today, he dispenses with that colour emphasis, and sets his palette with the sober, but still rich, greys and browns of Moroni’.²⁸P. G. Konody, quoted in ‘By an artist of rare distinction: the Glyn Philpot exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 21 Apr. 1923, p. 651. The following year George Sheringham remarked upon the manner in which ‘for a great many years now, Mr. Philpot’s work, especially in portraiture, has shown us how deep an impression his visits to Spain and studies of Spanish painting have made on his imagination and receptive mind’.²⁹George Sheringham, ‘Glyn Philpot: master craftsman’, The Studio, vol. 88, no. 376, Jul. 1924, p. 4. These qualities brought Philpot a steady stream of wealthy and aristocratic sitters, who were reassured that his portraits would endow their likenesses with an air of stately gravitas. The solo exhibition that Philpot held at London’s Grosvenor Galleries in 1923 (his first solo show since 1910) was a social triumph, the private viewing being attended by two grand-daughters of Queen Victoria, Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, the Countess of Bessborough, Lady Cynthia Asquith, the Earl of Crawford, Lord and Lady Strathspey and the Ranee of Sarawak among others.³⁰‘Art exhibition’, The Times, 13 Apr. 1923, p. 15.

A deeply spiritual man, Philpot converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905, and elaborate religious paintings commanded his attention throughout the 1920s. These co-existed alongside the artist’s commitment to painting and drawing male beauty and the male nude, in an era of fluid if still highly closeted sexuality in Britain. By the close of the 1920s, however, Philpot’s new openness about his homosexuality was accompanied by a sea change in his art of major proportions. In 1931, seeking new aesthetic directions, he moved to Paris, where he suddenly absorbed influences from the work of both Pablo Picasso and the French Surrealists. As Delaney has observed, ‘Glyn’s sexual liberation may also have played a part in this, in that freeing himself from the inhibitions and moral absolutes of his youth may have helped free him from its conservative artistic certitudes’.³¹Delaney, 1999, p. 114–15. A trip to Berlin now opened Philpot’s eyes even further, as he experienced the decadent nightlife in the politically dangerous and sexually charged German capital, where he also seems to have absorbed aspects of the grimly satiric art of George Grosz and Otto Dix. As he wrote to his sister about his experiences in Berlin:

I can’t even now begin to tell you how strange & wonderful it was. We stayed up all night every night and slept or bathed half the day. It is the most extraordinary experience. I saw beautiful & terrible things … I believe I shall work better for having seen sides of human nature which I have never looked on before … Darling, I am sorry if I sound mysterious about Berlin – You will think that I have been ‘wallowing in vice’ … it was I think the complete break with everything I am accustomed to which has put everything into focus for me & with such intensity that I feel the paint will explode onto the canvas.³²Philpot, letters to his sister Daisy, Sep. and Oct. 1931; quoted in ibid., p. 119.

Back in Paris, secluded in an ultra-modernist steel and glass studio apartment, Philpot now sought to reinvent himself, experimenting with radical new paintings that engaged with Picasso, Surrealism and German Expressionism, and explored the erotically heightened milieus of the modern metropolis.

These dramatic changes in style and subject matter were unveiled at a new solo exhibition that Philpot held at London’s Leicester Galleries in June 1932, shocking the London art world. Defending his shift to dry, chalky textures, a cool pastel palette and semi-abstracted compositions unified by elegant silhouettes, Philpot argued that:

This change has arisen from the conviction that new modes of expression are continually necessary if the artist is to add to the sum of beauty in the world, and not merely to echo, or to express admiration for, some beauty already crystallized in a recognized form … In my own case the change has been towards a simplification of technique, a sacrifice of the ‘expected’ qualities of surface in order to obtain more rapidity and flexibility of handling and a greater force of accent.³³Glyn Philpot, ‘The making of a picture’, Apollo, vol. 17. no. 102, Jun. 1933, p. 287.

Philpot had not just transgressed aesthetically, though. His new depictions of decadent Berlin nightlife were full of intimations of a sexual profligacy that all but flaunted the artist’s hitherto unspoken homosexuality. While in Berlin, Philpot had begun a relationship with a handsome young German, Karl Heinz Müller. Müller was missing two fingers from his left hand, which clearly indicates him as the model for a homoerotically charged painting shown in 1932, Fugue, 1931–32 (private collection), in which Müller appeared three times, nude, semi-nude and dressed, clearly occupying Philpot’s Paris apartment with a view of the Boulevard Raspail through the window. Philpot included a portrait of Müller in the exhibition, titled with his full name, making his identification as the man posing nude in other works explicit.

The scantily clad protagonist in Philpot’s Oedipus, also shown in 1932, also bore the noble features and slim build of Müller (although his missing fingers are restored in this painting). The dialogue between Oedipus and the Sphinx forms the subject of this dazzling canvas in which crisp Art Deco silhouettes are enchained by Euclidian geometric tension. The ‘primitive’ features and massive petrified wings of this Sphinx contain strong echoes of the controversial guardian spirit Jacob Epstein had carved in 1908–12 for Oscar Wilde’s tomb in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Its powerful grip on the painting’s Oedipus figure, itself a cipher for the artist’s libido, encapsulates Philpot’s struggle at this time with both his sexuality and the modernist esprit that he had moved to Paris in 1931 to confront and assimilate.

Oedipus was purchased for the National Gallery of Victoria from the Leicester Galleries exhibition by the critic Randall Davies, acting in his capacity as Adviser to the Felton Bequests’ Committee. Randall Davies, the husband of the Philpot’s friend Gladys Miles, who had shared a studio with him in Chelsea in 1903, had known the artist for at least two decades. Davies informed both the Felton Bequests’ Committee and the NGV that ‘I bought this picture as marking the extraordinary change in the artist’s outlook, for while it reveals this change, it does not break right away from his old manner as do most of the others in the exhibition’.³⁴Randall Davies, letter to the Felton Bequests’ Committee and NGV, 28 Jul. 1932. He also noted receipt of a letter from Philpot that revealed the artist’s distress at this time: ‘Mr. Philpot wrote to me lately as follows: “I hope you won’t lose faith in me as so many people are doing at the moment! I know I am on the way to doing something better, in the only possible direction which is now genuine and real and true to me” ’.³⁵ibid.

Philpot certainly confounded Britain’s art critics with his 1932 Leicester Galleries exhibition. ‘What happens when a man changes his style so completely as when Mr. Glyn Philpot has done in this Exhibition’, queried Herbert Furst in the arts journal Apollo:

He has gone modern, he who was once upon a time regarded by the “moderns” as the very type and symbol of the traditionalist … There is no doubt that Mr. Philpot has given his critics a hard nut to crack and at the same time an invitation to eat their own words in public. For those who saw in him a brilliant continuator of Tradition will look upon his new phase as a disaster or will have to admit that those who condemned him for that reason were right, since the artist himself seems to announce his conversion to the new faith.³⁶Herbert Furst, ‘Recent paintings and sculpture by Glyn Philpot, R.A., at the Leicester Galleries’, Apollo, vol. 16, no. 91, Jul. 1932, p. 42.

Commenting on similarly advanced paintings that Philpot had shown at the Royal Academy several months before the Leicester Galleries show opened, The Scotsman, under the sub-heading ‘Glyn Philpot “Goes Picasso”’, felt that Philpot

had looked too long at, and caught infection from, some neo-classic nude by Picasso, or his disciples … This is certainly the sort of School of Picasso exercise one expects to find only at the shows of ‘advanced’ societies, and to find it in so conservative an Academy as this makes one rub one’s eyes in wonderment.³⁷‘The Royal Academy. This year’s exhibition. Conservative standards’, The Scotsman, 30 Apr. 1932, p. 17.

Reviewing the Leicester Galleries show itself, this newspaper’s critic again stressed how ‘Glyn Philpot is a Royal Academician who refuses to go on from year to year repeating the methods which made him famous … his mind is always open to new impressions, and as he has been living of late in Paris he has been impressed with the works of the post-impressionists Picasso, Chirico, Dufresne and others … The debt to Picasso is obvious’.³⁸‘Art in London. Glyn Philpot’s work. An artist of many styles’, The Scotsman, 9 Jun. 1932, p. 13.

Writing in The Times, critic Frank Rutter first of all felt that Philpot’s contributions to the Royal Academy show were guaranteed to startle the horses: ‘Some surprise will be caused by the paintings in the last room from Mr. Glyn Philpot, R. A. , who has “gone modern” with a suddenness that must create concern. The change … may bring him new admirers, but is likely to scandalize his old adherents’.³⁹Frank Rutter, ‘The Academy. Efficiency without inspiration’, The Times, 1 May 1932, p. 13. After visiting the Leicester Galleries show, he became more concerned, writing of how Philpot’s

excursions into flame-like colours are often accompanied by a disconcerting looseness in the drawing and design, and his technical gifts are too often devoted to the expression of imaginings of a morbid tendency … ‘Oedipus’ (21), ‘Leda’ (11), and ‘Lokal, Berlin’ (17) may be cited as examples of other paintings in which sex obsession appears to be symbolised.⁴⁰Frank Rutter, ‘The Galleries, Glyn Philpot, R. A.’, The Times, 12 Jun. 1932, p. 7.

To consider what the implications of Going Picasso might have meant for an artist like Glyn Philpot in the 1930s, one can turn to the writing of the most widely read and popular American art critic of his day, the anti-modernist Thomas Craven. In his Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning, published in 1934, Craven argued that:

Modern painting, since the death of Cézanne, runs amuck through a succession of cults, and ends, exhausted and impotent, in the present School of Paris … The exponents of method, of composition for its own sake, were consolidated under the name of Cubism, with Picasso as its leader … They produced abstractions and geometrical posters; in plain words, ingenious patterns, some flat, some in relief, all testifying to a very thorough acquaintance with historical ways and means, but all devoid of any meaning above and beyond the technical exhibition of processes.

Elsewhere, here, Craven argued that:

The artist is losing his masculinity. The tendency of the Parisian system is to disestablish sexual characteristics, to merge the two sexes in an androgynous third containing all that is offensive to both. If you doubt the growing effeminacy of the artist, you have only to examine the performances of the modern École de Paris (School of Paris). The school is fundamentally sexless, from Picasso to Laurencin and Dufy …. In essence, it is an emasculated art, an art of fashions, styles, and ambiguous patterns.

Craven also wrote about what he called ‘the most offensive element in modern art – the gigolo and the homosexual playing on the vanities of bored women’.⁴¹Thomas Craven, Modern Art. The Men, the Movements, the Meaning, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1934, pp. 218–9, 29, 354. To modern eyes, it seems odd to see Picasso, now held to be an exemplar of toxic masculinity in modern art, decried by Craven as effeminized and sexless.

When, in 1932, Philpot’s art suddenly no longer looked reassuringly Old Master-like and masculine, could it now have seemed feminised, even emasculated, to use Craven’s term? Reviewing the 1932 exhibition in the Connoisseur, F. Gordon Roe wrote that: ‘It has been rumoured that Mr. Philpot became unsettled in his attitude to art during a stay in Paris, as a result of which he has virtually abandoned that fine, scholarly and richly competent performance which placed him in the front rank of contemporary British painters’; now, instead, he ‘had not scrupled to indulge in certain lapses from orthodoxy of which the value was anything but obvious’.⁴²F. Gordon Roe, ‘The riddle of Glyn Philpot’, Connoisseur, vol. 90, no. 372, Aug. 1932, p. 125.

The controversy surrounding Philpot’s 1932 exhibition made the artist’s clients nervous. Portrait commissions all but dried up in 1932–33, and Philpot was increasingly beset by financial problems as his new paintings failed to fetch the prices his work had earlier enjoyed. Having been paid upwards of £2000 for his society portraits in the 1920s, he could secure only £500 from the few clients who would agree to sit for him now. He was forced to abandon his Paris studio, to sell his lavish home in Sussex, and to dismiss his chauffeur. His health broken, Glyn Philpot died suddenly, of heart failure, at the end of 1937. His long-time companion, Vivian Forbes, committed suicide eight days later. Was there more to this sudden decline in Philpot’s fortunes than his having ‘Gone Picasso’ (that is, lost his masculinity)? Could rumours have circulated about his having crossed some invisible sociosexual line, leading former male patrons to look back on their earlier, handsome portraits, and wonder just what differentiated them from Philpot’s publicly exhibited paintings that so clearly hero-worshipped his various boyfriends?

If this seems like too modern a reconsideration of Philpot’s fall from grace, one has to wonder, if his sexuality remained an unspoken secret (and certainly, as we have seen, nothing openly appeared in print until 1999), just how did his art become visually synonymous with the scandal of homosexuality within twenty years after his death? This occurred in 1959 when, adapting Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer for the screen with a new screenplay by Williams and Gore Vidal, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and producer Sam Spiegel employed Oliver Messel as Head Production Designer.

One of Britain’s most talented stage designers, Oliver Messel had known Philpot since he was a child, Messel’s parents having commissioned Philpot to paint family portraits in 1913. Oliver Messell later recalled how ‘Glyn’s inspiration as an artist and a friend had possibly the greatest influence on my life. He was like one of those Great Masters of the Renaissance. Seeing him in his studio I always felt exhilaration then and afterwards’.⁴³Biographical notes (undated) by Oliver Messel; quoted in Delaney, 1999, p. 40. Messel was homosexual himself, which doubtless helped cement his bond with Philpot.⁴⁴Charles Castle, Oliver Messel: A Biography, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986, p. 124.

The setting for Suddenly, Last Summer is New Orleans in 1937. That this was, coincidentally, the year in which Philpot died, may have had some bearing upon Messel’s decision to memorialise his friend and early mentor within it. When the film opens we meet the wealthy widow, Violet Venable (played by Katherine Hepburn), who is keen to secure the services of a promising young surgeon, Dr Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to perform a memory-erasing lobotomy on her niece by marriage Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), whom Venable has had incarcerated in a mental asylum for ‘her dreadful, obscene babblings … Fantastic delusions and babblings of an obscene nature, mostly taking the form of hideous attacks on the moral character of my son, Sebastian’.⁴⁵The complete screenplay for Suddenly, Last Summer is available online at https://www.scripts.com/script/suddenly%2C_last_summer_19053; accessed 30 July 2021. All subsequent quotes in this essay are drawn from this source. The problems began the previous summer, when Holly/Taylor was supposedly disturbed by witnessing Sebastian die from a heart attack while the two were holidaying in Spain.

In the first interview between Venable and Cukrowicz, which takes place at the lavish Venable mansion, the film’s script drops clues as to the nature of Violet Venable’s dead son. The elaborate jungle-like garden Venable’s son created there ‘was Sebastian’s idea. Part of his lifelong war against the herbaceous border’. Sebastian Venable, she tells Cukrowicz, was a poet, whose work ‘was quite unknown outside of a small coterie of friends, including his mother … Strictly speaking, his life was his occupation … because the work of a poet is the life of a poet. And vice versa’. With the audience’s suspicions aroused that there may have been something effete and effeminate about Sebastian, the scene is set for Venable to invite Cukrowicz to view the dead Sebastian’s studio.

Upon entering this room, the first thing Venable/Hepburn and Cukrowicz/Clift encounter is a large oil by Oliver Messel painted in the manner of Glyn Philpot, depicting a black male nude.⁴⁶This painting by Messel, Portrait of a black man, c. 1959, is in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. I am most grateful to Simon Martin, Director, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, for identifying this work, painted in the manner of Philpot. At the back of the room, reproductions of other black male nudes painted by Philpot are pinned up.

The bulk of this scene is played out against a wide view of Sebastian’s studio, in which Philpot’s framed drawing of the sensuous model George Bridgman (whose ‘curiously ambivalent quality’ Sewter had been drawn to in 1951) is juxtaposed with Sandro Botticelli’s painting Saint Sebastian, 1474 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin).

At a pivotal moment, Cukrowicz/Clift flips through a folio containing other drawings of Bridgman by Philpot. Theatrical masks by Messel himself are also placed around Sebastian’s studio.

The visual implications to anyone ‘in the know’ are clear – Sebastian Venable must be homosexual for his studio to contain so many tributes to male beauty drawn and painted by the homosexual Glyn Philpot. As the film unfolds, the audience gradually comes to realise that Holly/Taylor is not mad at all, and certainly not in need of a lobotomy. Rather than witnessing Venable/Hepburn’s son die of a heart attack last summer, she was actually traumatised by watching Sebastian be murdered by a gang of straight youths. Sebastian had lured these young men to himself, using the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor as sexual bait to reel them into his orbit in the hopes of persuading one of them to have sex with him instead. This is the sexual scandal that Venable/Hepburn was hoping to cover up by having a lobotomy performed on her niece. All this was incredibly shocking for 1959, especially Holly/Taylor’s vivid memory of ‘cousin Sebastian … lying naked on the broken stones. And this you won’t believe. Nobody, nobody could believe it. It looked as if … as if they had devoured him! As if they had torn or cut parts of him away with their hands, or with knives or those jagged tin cans … and stuffed them into their own gobbling mouths!’

Despite the fact that the original play Suddenly, Last Summer was written by the homosexual Williams, the film’s screenplay was predominately written by the mostly homosexual Vidal, and the central character of Dr Cukrowicz played by the bisexual Clift, no hint of normalization of same-sex relations was permitted to permeate the moralistic, condemnatory 1950s carapace that encased it. Film historian Vito Russo has described how, despite reflecting the prejudicial view of its day that ‘homosexuality becomes evil incarnate, the symbol of sterile decadence that is punishable by death’, the American Legion of Decency, an organisation that policed the morality of motion pictures for the ‘protection’ of Catholic audiences, after demanding that ‘all direct reference to homosexual relations’ be cut from Vidal’s script, ‘gave the film a special classification: “Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in tone even though it deals with sexual perversion”’.⁴⁷Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Harper & Row, New York, 1981, pp. 108, 116.

For Glyn Philpot, despite Messel’s intention most likely having been to posthumously honour his art, its inclusion within Suddenly, Last Summer represented a massive fall in his moral reputation, the dashing ‘Beau Brummel of painting’ in Edwardian times now being associated with, in Russo’s words, ‘Williams’ tortured view of a failed homosexual artist and the people he victimises with his abnormal desires’.⁴⁸ibid., p. 116.

Ted Gott is Senior Curator, International Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria

Notes