Glyn Philpot

This fine watercolour was drawn on one of Glyn Philpot’s visits to North Africa, where he travelled on various occasions between 1920 and the year before his death. As the artist’s biographer has written of a visit to Morocco in the late summer of 1934, ‘Five days spent in Spain enabled him to do as many watercolours, a medium he had only recently taken up. In Morocco, where he stayed for a month, he was more prolific. ‘Doing masses of work & very happy,’ he told [his sister] Daisy; ‘Shall not return just yet unless necessary.’…In another letter, he wrote, ‘I am working better and better & hope to have a wonderful lot of watercolours.’ Indeed, he did twenty or thirty in Morocco. His subjects were not the touristic sights such as the magnificent mosques, but rather the people, the shops, the courtyards, the scenes of daily life…These are mostly rapid sketches, very delicate in colour, and full of North African sunlight.’ Many of Philpot’s North African watercolours from that trip were exhibited at the interior designer Syrie Maugham’s new shop on Bruton Street in London in March 1935; this was the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist’s watercolours. 

The present sheet was probably drawn during a return trip to the Maghreb in 1936, when the artist travelled around Morocco, visiting Fez, Casablanca, Moulay Driss Zerhoun, Marrakesh and Tangier. The drawing of water lilies on the verso of the sheet can be related to two similar watercolour studies of the same subject of c.1937, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery that year and later in the collection of Philpot’s niece Gabrielle Cross.

This Head of a North African Woman was included in what was to be Philpot’s final one-man show, held at the Redfern Gallery in London in November 1937, a few weeks before his death. The exhibition included twenty-five paintings and forty-six watercolours and was a commercial and critical success, with some £2,000 worth of pictures sold in the first week alone. A newspaper review of the exhibition noted, ‘The water-colours are all wonderfully accomplished, but here again Mr. Philpot’s line is almost too elegant and his colour almost too refined. Can work with so little sense of struggle behind it be quite satisfying? Or is it that this kind of aristocracy in painting has been spoiled for us by the modern fashion for stammering incoherence that passes itself off as sincerity?’ 

This watercolour was acquired from the 1937 Redfern exhibition by William Henry Smith, 3rd Viscount Hambleden (1903-1948), and remained with his descendants for the next eighty years.