'The latest news in the art world is that Mr Glyn Philpotts [sic] has been asked to remove his picture from the RA...' Virginia WoolfGlyn Philpot (1884-1937) was a portrait, figure and still-life painter and a sculptor. One of the most financially successful portrait painters of his generation, he achieved early prominence in both Britain and America. Philpot was a senior public figure who embodied deep personal contradictions. In 1933 at the age of 49, he submitted The Great Pan to the Royal Academy. The painting made explicit what had for so long been a coded language within homosexual writing and art and the artist suffered the ignominy of public rejection.The young Glyn Philpot circulated in the close company of the Edwardian aesthetes. Portraits financed his more committed work on subject pictures. In the Symbolist tradition, they reflect his deepest concerns: religious themes reveal a profound knowledge of his adopted Catholicism, while an increasing interest in the male nude and a series of superb portraits of young men, his black servants, models, friends and lovers, show the gradual public expression of his homosexuality. The tensions between his public and personal lives led Philpot to spend long periods outside Britain. In 1931, he visited Berlin. His encounter with that city's homosexual underworld had a profound spiritual and emotional effect and Philpot adopted a new style which owed much to international modernism.Philpot's new style was greeted with overt hostility. The scandal led to a period of acute financial hardship which undoubtedly contributed to the artist's early death at 53. Tragically, Philpot did not live long enough to see what he regarded as his most ambitious work accepted or approved. His reputation as a portraitist never faltered, but his subject pictures remain controversial. In 1985, the National Portrait Gallery, London staged a major retrospective of his work.In this fascinating account of an artist whose career bridged the transition between Edwardian aestheticism and international modernism, Paul Delaney has skilfully brought together disparate elements to reveal the personal, social and artistic crises that transformed Glyn Philpot's work.

"Much of Philpot's work remains to be re-discovered ... If this exhibition achieves anything, however, it will demonstrate that Philpot was not only one of the most gifted portrait painters in a long British tradition, but also an original and sensitive artist, whose work has a recognisably individual beauty of technique and a virility of style and concept."--Page 35.

From reviews of previous volumes: "Has the qualities that a great edition should have: it is meticulously thorough and accurate, and its aids to the reader are clear and comprehensive."--Times Literary Supplement. "An indispensable work of scholarship."--Nineteenth-Century Fiction. The correspondents in this volume range widely--from Edmund Gosse and Walter de la Mare to Ezra Pound--and the letters show an aging Hardy still deeply involved in all aspects of his professional life The nearly 700 letters, most of which have never been published, are supplemented by scrupulous annotation and extensive cross-referencing, by a chronology covering Hardy's entire career, and by an index of correspondents included in this volume.