Private Lives

Glyn Philpot (1884-1937), Mrs. Henry Mond, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 59.5 x 54 in., Private Collection

The outlook isn’t brilliant for representational painters today.  We’re using so much strategy that we haven’t time to play.  It’s all teaching or attending workshops and art classes, making or viewing instructional videos, updating websites, cultivating or reading blogs, composing artist statements, writing or being interviewed for “how-to” industry publications, answering calls for entries to juried shows, photographing paintings, emailing digital images to galleries, selling on the Internet, stretching canvas, preparing panels, renovating studio and storage spaces, crating and shipping paintings, and swearing fealty to digital photography and computer art.  In addition, most of us have to work part-time or full-time at other jobs in order to pay the rent and buy linen canvas, pochade boxes and other expensive art supplies that are all the rage today.

There is hardly any time left to paint our masterpieces, which we produce at all hours of the day and night under very strong artificial light so we can actually see our models, still life setups, or reference materials clearly enough to paint photographically. Despite all this frenetic activity, we still can’t paint and draw a fraction as well as the 19th and early 20th Century painters we love.  This drudgery of ours is all so boring to the media and the public at large.  Where is the drama in our private lives?

How different it was in Merry Old Edwardian England.  Take the protagonists of the stunningly beautiful painting shown above for instance.  Between the painter and the sitter, there are enough interesting tidbits about their private lives to keep a stable of romance novelists occupied for a decade.

Although I got sidetracked south of the border with the inscrutable Hermenegildo Bustos in my last post, I actually purchased that old issue of FMR magazine from Larry at the flea market because it displayed a superb, full-page, black-bordered reproduction of this painting.  The painter was Glyn Philpot (1884-1937), whose charming portrait of a young woman had inspired me a few posts ago to contrast the oil portraits of the past, which were done from life, with today’s insipid portraits done from photographs.  The sitter is Amy Gwen Mond (née Wilson), Lady Melchett, the wife of Henry Ludwig Mond, the 2nd Baron Melchett of Landford, who was a British politician, industrialist and financier.  This painting of Mrs. Mond is the finest one I have seen by this outstanding artist.  His work was on exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1985 when the photo and an article on him were featured in the January/February issue of FMR.

Philpot, an excellent draughtsman, painted traditional portraits and figurative work as good as any of his contemporaries early in his career.  He entered the Lambeth School of Art (now City and Guilds of London Art School) at the age of 15 and later studied with Jean-Paul Laurens at the Academie Julian in Paris.  He was skilled in oil, watercolor and sculpture.  His trips in 1906 and 1910 to Spain caused him to emulate the rich blacks he saw in the work of Velasquez.  The painting of Mrs. Henry Mond clearly shows he understood how wonderfully such blacks set off flesh tones and a “creamy” white dress.

Katherine Stephen, Principal (and Virginia Woolfe’s aunt), 1921, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 85 cm, Newnham College, University of Cambridge

Sir Thomas Herbert Warren (1853-1930), Oil on Canvas, 112 x 86 cm, 1927-8, Magdalen College, Oxford University

The Skyscraper, Oil on Canvas, 1916, 60.2 x 49.7 cm., Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, England

Resting Acrobats, n.d., Oil on canvas, 86.3 x 83.8 cm, Leeds Museums and Galleries

 

A Street Accident, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 54.2 cm, Manchester City Galleries

But from about 1930 until his death from a brain hemorrhage in 1937 at the age of 53, Philpot adopted a modern, more summary painting style that isn’t quite as much to my taste, for what that’s worth.  A homosexual at a time when British society was not so accepting, his later work fell out of favor with the public because he abandoned traditional realism to explore a variety of private notions regarding religious, mythological and allegorical subjects in a strangely symbolic and surrealistic manner that was hard to decipher.  He also began creating paintings that revealed his sexual orientation.

Writing about Philpot in the March 31, 2012 online issue of Advocate.com, Christopher Harrity declares that “the tension between his public life and his private sexual life erupted in his work. While academic works and portraits paid the bills, they allowed him to experiment with more sexual themes and studies of the male nude in private.”  He observes that depictions of non-religious works featuring the male nude were considered homoerotic in Philpot’s day, and such depictions by an artist represented “a defiant act of bravery.”  In addition, Harrity writes that “Philpot was also very interested in depicting black men in his work, which further alienated him from the mainstream art world and society patronage. One of the best-known black models was Henry Thomas, who was also Philpot's manservant for several years.”

Henry  Ludwig Mond, 2^nd Baron Melchett of Landford (1898-1949), 1932, Oil on Canvas, 49.5 x 39.5 in

Gwen Mond, Lady Melchett, Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 71.7 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Sleeping Nude, 1931

Glyn Philpot and his Jamaican Manservant, Henry Thomas, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

In 1914 or 1915, depending on the Internet source, Philpot joined the British infantry, where he met his long-time lover, a fellow soldier and aspiring painter by the name of Vivian Forbes.  They apparently had a stormy but rewarding relationship that ended tragically when Philpot died unexpectedly and Forbes committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills the day after the funeral.

Gwen Mond (Lady Melchett), the subject of Philpot’s masterpiece, who died in 1982 at the age of 83, and her husband, Henry Mond (Lord Melchett) who died in 1949 at the age of 51, were important patrons of the artist and remained faithful to him during his dramatic shift to a modern style of painting in his last years.  In fact, it is believed they may have encouraged that change by commissioning Philpot to add wall decorations of “The Loves of Jupiter,” painted on silver foil, to the critically acclaimed modernist Drawing Room of Mulberry House, their London residence, which was designed by the prominent British architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944).  The Monds counted many other artists among their friends, including Edward Seago and Augustus John, and held views similar to the liberated Bloomsbury crowd of artists and writers.

Amy Gwen Wilson, the daughter of a South African businessman, was an aspiring artist who had studied with Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer at the Slade.  She met her future husband in typical fashion, according to a fascinating article written by Eric Turner in Apollo Magazine and republished on the blog Esoteric Curiosa Nov. 23, 2009.  One evening in 1917, Henry crashed his motorcycle outside the London artist’s studio Gwen was sharing with her lover, the novelist Gilbert Cannan.  “She rushed outside to find Mond lying in the road, badly injured. Impetuously, she insisted on taking him inside and nursing him back to health. What Cannan thought of this arrangement is unrecorded.  Mond became their lodger and, with Gwen’s solicitous nursing, he recovered. Inevitably, he fell in love with her. They set up a ménage à trois with Cannan that became the subject of much speculative gossip in London literary circles… Her ménage à trois with Cannan and Mond persisted for nearly two years. In the autumn of 1919, Cannan went on a lecture tour of the United States to promote the work of his friend D.H. Lawrence. During his extended absence, Mond married Gwen, precipitating Cannan’s final, catastrophic and irreversible mental breakdown.” 

Gwen Wilson and Henry Mond were married Jan. 30, 1920 when he was 22 and she was a 21-year-old “show-stopping beauty,” everyone seemed to agree.  They had two sons and one daughter.  In 1930 they commissioned Philpot to create  murals for the art-deco drawing room of Mulberry House, which had as its centerpiece, Charles Sargeant Jagger’s relief “Scandal,” now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Scandal  by Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885- 1934), 1930. Patinated bronze, 149 x 161.4 cm. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Eric Turner relates that the relief was commissioned as “a satirical reference to their early ménage à trois.”  The blog’s creator writes that Turner’s article “reveals the tale of sex and money that lay behind its creation.”  For much, much more on this intriguing tale, here’s the link:  http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2009/11/art-intimates-life-mond-menage-trois.html.

Well, that’s it for me.  I’m finished.  I think I’ll take another nap.  Now all you other artists get busy and put a little scandal in your private lives.  Unless I miss my guess, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.