Glyn Philpot was a celebrated society painter and devout Catholic convert whose deep faith conflicted with his homosexuality, writes Simon Martin, curator of a new exhibition of the artist’s work

Best known during his lifetime as a society portrait painter, seen as the successor to John Singer Sargent, in the early part of the twentieth century Glyn Philpot painted everyone who was anything, from the “Bright Young Thing” Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, to poets and writers including Siegfried Sassoon.

He was one of the highest paid and most in-demand artists of the period, able to charge as much as £3,000 for a portrait of King Fuad of Egypt in 1923. The lucrative portraits funded a glamorous lifestyle of champagne and caviar, a country house and chauffeur-driven cars, but they were not necessarily where the artist’s personal interests lay.

His career was characterised by contradictions: alongside depictions of titled members of the aristocracy were portrayals of handsome working-class men, imaginative compositions based on classical mythology and expressions of his profound religious faith. Alongside his deep-rooted respect for tradition, he was committed to 1930s Modernism. All of this means Philpot is hard to pin down, never fully in one camp or the other.