Glyn Warren Philpot, R.A. (1884-1937)

'These pictures revealed his consummate mastery of technique, his command of an unusual beauty of surface and colour, and his instinctive grasp of expressive pose and composition … Their rich and sonorous tonality, their strong, unusual, and subtly harmonized colour schemes, pointed clearly to the arrival of a master’ (A.C. Sewter (intro.), G. Philpot 1884-1937, London, 1951, p. 3).

Three Fates is one of the finest works of the 1930s. This time marked a tremendous period of creative activity and signaled a transformation of style for the artist. Philpot moved away form the Edwardian Romantic aesthetic that preoccupied his early work, where literary, religious and symbolical character dominated, reflecting the poetic tendencies of the Pre-Raphaelites and his close friends Charles Rickets and Charles Shannon, to a more Modernist aesthetic, which looked to the examples of the European Modernist artists. As portrayed in Three Fates, there was now an emphasis on a lighter and more harmonious use of tone and colour, a looser and more enlivened brushstroke, and a renewed focus on line and surface. This transition also saw an increased plasticity within his work, shown to marvellous effect here in the sculptural forms of his three figures.

We are very grateful to Charles Beddington for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.