English artist Glyn Philpot was BOTD in 1884. Born in London, he was raised in Herne near Canterbury. He studied at the Lambeth School of Art in London. In 1902, aged 19, he held his first solo exhibition in London, and had a painting accepted for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition. He moved to Paris in 1905 to study at the Académie Julian, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. Handsome, gregarious and well-connected, he became a successful portraitist in the style of John Singer Sargent, painting many of the leading figures of London society including Siegfried Sassoon, Robbie Ross, Oswald Mosley, Stanley Baldwin and the Duchess of Westminster. He surrounded himself with a largely homosexual circle, including the gay artist couple Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, designer Oliver Messel and composer Roger Quilter. He travelled widely in Europe, the United States and North Africa during the 1920s, where he developed a fetish for young Black men. In 1923, he was elected a Royal Academician, the youngest artist of his generation to be so honoured. Later that year, he formed a relationship with soldier-turned-painter Vivian Forbes, who became his life partner. Philpot helped Forbes win painting commissions, often finishing the work himself during Forbes’ frequent bouts of mental illness. Alongside his portrait work, Philpot also painted religious and mythological subjects, allowing him to explore his love of the male body within a socially respectable context. Following a solo exhibition in Venice in 1930, he determined to abandon, spending a year in Paris studying sculpture, with little success. Inspired by the work of Pablo Picasso and the French Surrealists, and liberated by an affair with the handsome young German Karl Heinz Müller, he returned to painting. Abandoning the elegant formalism of his early work, he adoped abstract compositions, a cool pastel palette and unapologetically homoerotic themes. His subjects included Müller; the African-American actor Paul Robeson; his live-in Jamaican servant Henry Thomas; and his burly white working-class gardener George Bridgman. English critics mocked his attempts at “going Picasso” and accused him of “losing his masculinity” and becoming “effeminate”. His portrait commissions dried up overnight, leaving him financially destitute. Further misfortune followed in 1933 when the Royal Academy rejected his painting The Great Pan. Philpot died in 1937, aged 53. The distraught Forbes killed himself a week later. Largely forgotten by the mid-20th century, interest in Philpot’s life and work was revived by a 1984 retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and by G. P. Delaney’s 1999 biography, containing the first critical discussion of his work as a gay artist.