British painter and sculptor, born in London. He studied at Lambeth School of Art, 1900–03, and at the *Académie Julian, Paris, 1905. It was as a portraitist that Philpot had his main success, which was at its height in the 1920s. However, he also did a mural, Richard I Leaving England for the Crusades (1927), for St Stephen's Hall, Westminster, and had ambitions as a painter of allegories and religious subjects (he became a convert to Catholicism in 1905). Philpot grew tired of routine fashionable portraiture (however lucrative it was) and in 1931 he moved to Paris for a year and started working in a more modern idiom—flatter and more stylized than his earlier manner. The new style met with a mixed reception and some of Philpot's earlier admirers were dismayed: ‘Glyn Philpot “Goes Picasso”’, read a headline in the Scotsman on 30 April 1932.

Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)


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