I’m standing in Brighton Museum & Gallery, in my preferred spot: opposite Glyn Philpot’s portrait of Mrs Gwendolen Cleaver (1933). I try and make sense of why I love the picture so much, why I feel the need to tell my friends to spend some time with it. Gwen, the subject, wears an outfit that looks more 1980’s punk than 1930’s society. She pouts sullenly away from Glyn, the artist in whose shoes I am metaphorically standing. ‘Why so melancholy?’, I want to ask my sitter.
If I didn’t know that Glyn was gay, I’d have said they’d had a lover’s tiff. Particularly as he never finished painting the detail in her left arm – perhaps she was getting impatient in sitting for him, or she’d changed her mind about off-the-shoulder couture. The portrait was possibly a commission from Gwen’s husband, whom she’d fallen out of love with years ago and it’s pale pigment face reflects her feelings of resignation to emotional bondage.
It’s impossible to pinpoint the source of the allure because for all my projected drama, I’m just staring at a picture of a woman in a black dress sitting on a chair. But somehow I feel like I know her and I owe her something, even though she’s dead / a product of a painter’s imagination and we’ll never, ever, meet. If Magritte were here, he might reprimand me, ‘Ce ne est pas une femme’. Rene, of course I know it’s a painting – not a woman, but there’s a whole lot more behind my wanting to own it than because I like the colours.
Later that day, I google Glyn Philpot (1884 – 1937) and discover that his career lurched from landing the commission for Siegfried Sasson’s official portrait to falling out of public favour after producing work deemed overly sexually explicit (before painting Mrs Gwendolen Cleaver). He ended up dying in poverty. Well maybe that’s it; I could sense and was drawn to his disillusionment with the attitudes of society. Maybe that’s what is conveyed in his subject’s discontented expression.
These days, against the broad spectrum of technology-based art mediums used in contemporary practice, painters are on the back foot. If an artist wants to make social commentary, to instantly connect with the public, it makes sense to use a form with immediacy, a recognisable instruction that reflects the reality of the viewer / the cutting-edge of communication technology; perhaps digital film, immersive mixed-media installation, sonics. As consumers of current entertainment we are used to having the work done for us, to having the message spelled out.
Now let’s talk specifically about the conveyance of the characteristics of a single human being to an audience. I might choose to portray my subject in a thousand different ways; metaphorically through the semblance of related objects, musically through tune and lyrics, as a set of metadata collected from questionnaires or online databases (see Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror Season 2. Ep. 1), some pages ripped from a diary, an exhibition of old school reports etc. etc. but I can almost guarantee the viewer would find none of these methods as magically engaging as a carefully composed photograph or painted portrait. Under the visual scrutiny of the artist, the subject becomes transformed into a hybrid representation of what is physically there and how the artist personally perceives it and uses their skill to convey their perception. The result is often so reminiscent of reality as to be unnerving in its convincing inauthenticity.
To me, a lifetime lover of both the practice of painting and the work of modern masters, the enjoyment of an oil on canvas portrait falls into a category of it’s own. With a photographic representation, the camera equipment has no social agenda so the model’s features are represented accurately, regardless of the pose, styling and purpose of the work. With a painted portrait comes the artist’s feeling towards the subject and the world, in a way that distorts physicality through choice of tone, stroke of brush; the viewer is always looking at a picture of a relationship and of the artist as much as their subject.
Mrs. Wood, my favourite art teacher once looked over my shoulder in class and remarked, ‘Oh no dear, you’ve got the line of the nun’s nose all wrong. That looks like your nose, hers is quite straight. They say we always paint ourselves into our work.’ Well if that’s true, then Glyn Philpot must have been a very beautiful man, because all of his portraits, to me, are stunning in their emotional vibrancy. I urge you to seek out his work. If you let your imagination engage with it, you’ll see more drama in his subject’s eyes than you will at your folks house on Christmas day.
By Rachel James
Image courtesy of Brighton Museum & Gallery