Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit

Pallant House Gallery 

14 May-23 October, 2022 

Review by Andy Bay 

‘At the end of the Great War in the early 1920s, Glyn Philpot and his models lived quietly between Paris and London, a period of artistic fecundity brought to life tenderly by curator Simon Martin in ‘Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit’. 

Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was a British high society portraitist who worked most of his life in London. He made a steady, healthy income, capturing the spirited lives and imperious features of the well-to-do. His premature death from a heart attack aged 53 led to his oeuvre being quietly consigned to oblivion. However, there’s now renewed interest in the passionate work which he pursued behind closed doors. 

Philpot was a wealthy, gay European, with a particular fondness for Afro-Caribbean men. His attraction to black men was most uncharacteristic of the times. His delicate brushstrokes ennobled the bodies and stunning facial expressions of a handful of Afro-Caribbean men, in works that are now on display at Pallant House for the first time. 

Balthazar, a portrait of Henry Thomas

In the early 1920s, black American entertainers in Harlem, New York, pioneered drag balls, and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ attracted a melting pot of thousands of euphoric, multi-ethnic, cross gender men and women of all sexual orientations. One of them, Tom Whiskey, whom Philpot befriended in Paris in the 1930s, figures in the exhibition’s first room. Whiskey is a light-skinned black cabaret performer, with ‘silent-screen movie star’ looks, a gorgeous midnight body with flowery high cheekbones and perfectly slicked back hair. The modernist style and cool blue tones of the painting bring to life the bohemian nonchalance of a worldly, louche Paris jazz club. Further along, Paul Robeson, the African-American actor and opera singer, is proudly captured in the role of Othello, against stripped down grey and green highlights. He looks ominous, thunderous, a towering Moor, evoking the spirit of ‘Othello’. 

Portrait of Henry Thomas

Henry Thomas, the Afro-Caribbean most frequently featured in the show, was both Philpot’s personal housekeeper and full-time model. Two portraits of Thomas as the Commedia dell’arte characters ‘Harlequin’ and ‘Balthazar’, are sumptuous. Thomas’s facial proportions, in brown and blue-grey watercolour, are remarkably symmetrical: long stretched lines and glorious angles, full of feline energy.  In ‘The Jamaican Man in Profile’, one of a series of meditative and soulful canvases, Thomas is captured staring languidly into the sea, against shiny orange backgrounds.

‘Melancholy Man’ imagines him as a stilted erotic marionette, pinned against blue and yellow-lit walls, sitting on a plain stool. Philpot patiently adds deeper shades of stunning colours into each painting, which become strikingly apparent, once we see the canvases up close. 

Tom Whiskey (M Julien Zaïre)

Although considerable progress has been made in our society towards the acceptance of all sexual orientations, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that homosexuality remainded subject to legal prosecution throughout Philpot’s life. ‘Flesh and the Spirit’, then, is an extraordinary commentary on a bygone time, far less enlightened than our own, and equally uncertain. Philpot and his stunning models remind us that the process of objectification of our identities can be overcome only by creating a counter discourse; the self-articulation of our individual freedoms can be constructed with the language of our own aesthetic truths and convictions, in spite of the limitations of class and cultural background.

Images courtesy of Pallant House