We've lent to Pallant House Gallery's Glyn Philpot exhibition

14 May - 23 October 2022

 

The Maas Gallery has lent Glyn Philpot's Miss Isabel McBirney to Pallant House Gallery's exhibtion: Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Blood (14 May - 23 October 2022).

 

The first major exhibition of British artist Glyn Philpot R.A. (1884-1937) in almost 40 years. Bringing together over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, many unseen in public for decades, the exhibition charted the artist’s development from Edwardian society portraits to his shift to a radically modernist style in the 1930s.

 

The exhibition included his portraits of actors, dancers, poets, society hostesses, male lovers and friends, examining his important contribution to the sensitive representation of Black sitters from the 1910s to 1930s, and his exploration of both queer and religious subjects... READ MORE

14 May 2022
  • Glyn Warren Philpot (1884-1937), Miss Isabel McBirney

    Glyn Warren Philpot (1884-1937)

    Miss Isabel McBirney

    Oil on canvas; signed and dated 1913, labelled 

    50 x 36 inches

     

    This luminous portrait was painted in 1913, during Philpott’s first visit to Illinois, the guest of philanthropist Robert Allerton Allerton, at his estate, ‘The Farms’, at Monticello, Illinois. Allerton had met Philpot in London and invited him to make a first visit to the USA, ostensibly to paint for him (the two may have been more than friends). His reputation in the US had been greatly enhanced by his prize-winning submission of ‘The Marble Worker’ (1911) to the International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1913. The Chicago Tribune (23 November 1913) called this portrait 'a great success. Miss McBirney is painted standing in an orange velvet gown against a background of indefinable color, with a touch of deep blue in a bit of drapery in the foreground. The picture is instilled with life and spirit. It will probably be given space in the Art Institute while the McBirneys are in Europe, whither they plan going in January.’ The same newspaper (28 June 1914) described the sitter, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer: ‘'The Girl with the personality’: That’s how her friends speak of Miss Isabel McBirney of Lake Forest. She is stunning to look at with her wealth of Titian hair, and she does many things well, including taking part in amateur theatricals, playing golf and tennis. But it is for none of these things that she is noted. It is the ‘personality’ that makes people turn around and look as she passes and that makes friends for her wherever she goes.’ This commission, secured for him by Allerton, is the only recorded work done on this trip which was not for, or of, his host.