Man in white

Posed in a wicker chair, Glyn Philpot’s ‘man in white’ is handsome, athletic, and casually dressed.

The intimate, pared-down portrait was a radical departure from Philpot’s formal, dark-toned earlier works. In Paris, the English artist had been influenced by Matisse and Picasso, and began to experiment with simplified forms and techniques. The light palette, visible brushstrokes, and almost ‘woven’ paint surface of Man in white are typical of his work after 1930. For Philpot, ‘new modes of expression are continually necessary if the artist is to add to the sum of beauty in the world’.

The subject of Man in white is Philpot’s friend Jan Erland. This is one of a group of portraits that he painted of Erland, all on the theme of sports and leisure. Writing to his sister Daisy, Philpot described ‘every moment with this dear Jan’ as filled with ‘inspiration and beauty’.

Glyn Philpot was gay, and spent much of his adult life in a relationship with the artist Vivian Forbes. He lived at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence and was never explicit about his sexuality. But in the 1930s he painted numerous works like this one – portraits of handsome men, full of love and desire.