Seated Model in the Studio (Henry Thomas) depicts Glyn Philpot’s domestic servant and occasional life model Henry Thomas. Thomas lived with the artist at his country house called Baynards Manor, a large mock Tudor property near Horsham, West Sussex. The model is depicted sitting on a stool wearing only a small, burgundy thong. The attitude of his body is relaxed but not entirely natural: the placement of the hands and the hunched shoulders suggest a degree of posturing. The appeal of the subject for Philpot was certainly homoerotic, but his depiction of male nudity was consistently ambiguous and never transgressed contemporary standards of propriety. The execution of the painting is characteristic for the late period of Philot’s career, and the surface is covered with a thin coat of dry, precisely applied brush marks. A priming layer of lambent, pale yellow paint grins through the surface, and this bathes the picture in glowing, atmospheric light. The underlayer grins through around the silhouette of the figure in places, and this may suggest that the figure was painted first and the background was worked up afterwards. The painting was almost certainly painted from life, and the modelling of the figure uses a narrow, sophisticated range of colour that harmonises with the glowing, buff tonality of the studio around it. A sense of the artist’s studio is provided by the neat stack of canvases leaning against an easel on the right-hand side of the picture. Partially obscured behind the figure of Henry Thomas, another canvas stands on an easel with its back turned to the viewer.

Philpot began to make portraits of black sitters in the middle of his career. One of the earliest was a portrait of an Italian solider (1922, Ashmolean Museum). After they met in 1929, Philpot’s friend and manservant Henry Thomas sat for a succession of intimate paintings, mostly head and shoulder portraits, which reveal the inadequacy of most previous paintings of black people by white artists, as well as the shallowness of many subsequent ones. In 1936 and 1937, Philpot made several full-length and three-quarter-length paintings of Thomas. These paintings frequently personify Thomas in role—as harlequin, ‘melancholy man’, ‘man thinking of heaven’ (fig. 1), and so on. Seated Model in the Studio (Henry Thomas) is less staged and more naturalistic by comparison; close observation and the artist’s sympathetic interest in his subject produced an image closer to portraiture than character type.

In the early thirties, Glyn Philpot made a self-conscious stylistic change in his work. He underwent a Pauline conversion while serving on a prize-judging panel with Henri Matisse in Paris. The resulting change in his practice deserves recognition as one of the least likely and most interesting developments in twentieth-century British art. Where conventional accounts of modernism typically ascribe novelty to avant-garde intent, Philpot remained conservative in some respects: he continued to make society portraits, present his pictures in elaborately moulded plaster frames, and use a swift, assured, stylish mode of drawing. Nevertheless, this late style, mannerist in character, produced more distinctive painting and imagery than any previous phase of his career. While adopting a much lighter palette and broken touches of the brush, laid cleanly on a bright ground (in many cases there is no underpainting), he continued to achieve a highly controlled artifice where looseness was studied, not spontaneous.