Portrait of a Young Boy depicts an adolescent member of the Mond family who were significant patrons of Glyn Philpot. The Mond family fortune derived from Imperial Chemical Industries, of which Sir Alfred Mond (1868–1930) became the inaugural executive chairman in 1926. Philpot painted members of the Mond family on many occasions and he has colloquially been referred to as ‘the family photographer’. Portrait of a Young Boy was owned by Henry Mond, 2nd Lord Melchett (1898–1949), and his wife Gwen Mond, Lady Melchett. Owing to this provenance and the sophisticated Edwardian charm of the painting’s style, which places it sometime before 1914, it is almost certainly a childhood portrait of Henry. The boy in the painting might be anywhere between ten and fourteen years of age, which correlates with Henry’s age around the time that the painting was most likely executed.

Although he harboured early aspirations as a writer and poet, Henry Mond became involved in the family business and eventually served as deputy chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries in the forties. He also held other corporate positions during his career. He successfully ran for parliament on two occasions, in 1923 and 1929, first as a Liberal in the Isle of Ely and then as a Conservative in Liverpool East Toxteth, but his terms were brief. He lost Ely in the election of 1924, and he inherited his father’s title in 1930, which brought his career in the House of Commons to an abrupt conclusion. He married Gwen Wilson in 1920, who came to London from South Africa to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, was briefly connected to Augustus John, and, before marrying Henry in 1920, she was the mistress of the besotted novelist Gilbert Cannan.

Glyn Philpot had an extended relationship with various branches of the Mond family. A number of the family sat for him including Angela Mond (Mrs Emil Mond) and one Philip Mond. But his most extensive and numerous work was undertaken for Henry and Gwen Mond. They admired and purchased his paintings of imaginative subjects such as Balthazar (1929) and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1928). In two portraits of Gwen, made in 1927 and 1935, he imbued her with shimmering elegance and chic melancholy. He had an occasional line in fancy dress costume for one-off society events, and Philpot designed Gwen Mond an outfit as Joan of Arc that included ‘a huge banner and […] a blue velvet tunic stamped in gold’. Philpot’s grown-up portrait of Henry, exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1933, is strikingly informal for the period, and he is pictured in a reclining attitude dressed in a short-sleeved lilac polo shirt. The artist’s personal acquaintance with Gwen in particular produced portrayals in which superficial, de rigueur stylishness married with a rich sense of characterisation. Most significant of all, Philpot executed mural paintings depicting The Loves of Jupiter and other antique subjects in the drawing room of the couple’s home in Smith Square, Mulberry House, which they merged with the neighbouring house and renovated in 1930. The drawing room also included bronze fireplace decorations by Charles Sargeant Jagger, a fire basket and overmantel relief, which were acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008. It was one of the most celebrated and well-advertised interior redecorations of the era.