The women’s lips are pursed; the men’s are kissable: Glyn Philpot at Pallant House reviewed

Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his white-jacketed Jamaican model Henry Thomas must be the strangest. Taken to publicise his 1934 exhibition, it would be unthinkable now but in the circles Philpot moved in at the time it might, I suppose, have been viewed as cool.

For 20 years Philpot had been London’s leading portraitist, a position he inherited from Sargent. His sitters included admirals – four during the first world war – and King Fuad of Egypt, who commissioned a ‘dignified, decent, usual and rather sumptuous’ portrait from the 38-year-old artist for £3,000 in 1923, the year he was elected an RA. It was not his best work. He was less comfortable with male authority figures than with writers, actors and society hostesses, who queued up to be flattered by his brush. ‘All the papers are raving about P…,’ a friend reported in 1910. ‘Everyone is rushing to be painted like sheep.’

His success financed a studio in Tite Street, an arts and crafts manor in Sussex and a chauffeur-driven car, but by the 1930s he had tired of portrait commissions; his full-length of Loelia, Duchess of Westminster – who as Loelia Ponsonby had been hailed by Tatler as the ‘squadron leader of Society’s Young Brigade’ – on her marriage to the 2nd Duke of Westminster in 1929 was the last grand manner portrait he undertook.

Perhaps the shine had already come off the Bright Young Thing – the marriage would be a disaster – but Loelia’s portrait is a little insipid. Philpot had taken on Sargent’s mantle without his swagger.