GERALD HEARD OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Gerald Heard's Memoir of Glyn Philpot (c 1945)

Edited, with an Introduction

by Professor J. G. P. Delaney

Introduction

by J. G. P. Delaney, Ph.D.

This hitherto unknown and unpublished memoir of the English artist Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) by the philosopher and mystic Gerald Heard (1889-1971) gives a vivid and eloquent description of both the man and the artist.¹ Philpot’s tact, his personal charm and his engaging conversation are depicted as well as his great gifts as an artist, his manual dexterity and his concern with both meaning and with surface quality in painting. However, it was Philpot’s personality, which according to Heard was greater than the artist, that made him one of the most remarkable people that Heard had ever known. His account gives us a sensitive and well-rounded view of Philpot’s character.

Yet, Heard is also careful to place Philpot within the artistic movements of the day. His description of him as ‘the young hope of the old side’ aptly describes the great éclat with which he arrived on London’s artistic scene, famous by his mid-twenties as a brilliant young artist devoted to traditional values in painting, rather than to the revolutionary credos usually associated with the young. A contemporary review described his ‘Diabolical Cleverness.’² His first and very successful one-man show of portraits and his unashamedly literary subjects painted in glazes like the Old Masters was held in 1910, the year that the famous first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London announced the arrival of new values in art. He seemed the traditionalists’ answer to the Modern Movement.

This was to change radically in the early 1930s, when Philpot shocked the public and many of his patrons by adopting some modern techniques and principles. Heard perceptively notes the beginnings, and even the causes, of the change. Philpot eventually became tired of portraiture, though it had brought him fame and a large income. Such murals as the ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’ and the ‘Leda and the Swan’, which were painted on silver foil (a very up-to-date technique) for the dining room at Mulbery House in what Heard called his moonlight tone of ‘silvers, greens, and blues’, gave him a sense of freedom and challenge that he no longer experienced in his portraits or subject paintings. In this, Heard rightly sees ‘the beginning of the next effort - the attempt he made to achieve a kind of bridge between the classic tradition which he loved and the new thought in art.’ Philpot had always striven to acquire new techniques and to attempt new challenges within the classical tradition. Now, he came to feel that ‘new modes of expression are continually necessary if the artist is to add to the sum of beauty in the world, and not merely to echo, or to express some admiration for, some beauty already crystallized in a recognized form.’³ Philpot’s new style, first seen in the Royal Academy summer show in 1932, tried to combine modern elements such as expressive drawing, flat colours and simplified forms with the figurative subjects he had always loved. It led to hostile reviews in the press, to a drastic drop in income and to his having to sell his country house, Baynards, so vividly described by Heard.

When they met, Philpot at only 30 years old was already a famous artist, while Heard, five years his junior almost to the day,⁴ was a young man who had only recently left university. Both men were deeply interested in religion, but their religious journeys grew divergent. Both rejected the religion of their upbringing. Again, Philpot was the conservative. Having been raised a Baptist, he converted to Roman Catholicism, following in the tradition of many British artists and intellectuals who had ‘gone over to Rome’ since the Oxford Movement in the 19^th century. Even though his homosexual relationships later put him at odds with the church’s teachings and though he expressed some doubts on one occasion, he generally remained, as Heard declares, ‘wholly satisfied’ with the Catholicism he had embraced. Heard, on the other hand, had been raised an Anglican, and had even thought of taking Anglican orders, like his grandfather, his father and his older brother.⁵ However, his adventurous mind and his nervous breakdown in 1916, no doubt the result of conflicts caused by his strict upbringing under a stern father and an oppressive version of Christianity that emphasized hell and his own damnation, set him off on an entirely different route. In their early discussions, they had still had enough in common for Philpot to encourage his friend to become a Catholic. However, Heard had already moved so far from his early beliefs as to characterize these conversations as analogous to those between ‘a bird and a fish’.

By the time that his friendship with Philpot came to an end in about 1935, he had moved on from a short period as a secular humanist, who accepted the moral but not the theological tenets of Christianity, to Buddhism, pacifism, and the practice of yoga and personal asceticism. In his turn, he had also become quite famous as a scientific commentator on the BBC, and his lectures, published weekly in The Listener, were published in book form in 1932, 1935 and 1936. In 1924, he had published his first book Narcissus, followed in 1929 by The Ascent of Humanity, which earned him the Henrietta Hertz prize from The British Academy. In this, he interprets history, not as the traditional ‘drum and trumpet’ account of wars and battles, but rather as ‘the shadow cast by the evolving consciousness of man.’ Humanity had already evolved through various stages of consciousness, but the process was continuing and now humans, having mastered the outside world, must turn their attention inward and gain the self-knowledge and self-control that will enable them to identify again with the Life Force that pervades and contains the universe.

The disagreement between Philpot and Heard - ‘not so much on theology as on the issues from which theology rises and the acute problems of actual conduct’, as Heard put it, seems to have stemmed from the former’s perception of religion as a codified set of beliefs and ethical principles derived from Revelation in the Bible, and the latter’s rejection of formal religion in favour of a concentration on the evolution of man’s own consciousness and on an omnipresent, non-personal Life-force. Philpot’s intuitive love of metaphor made him prefer the rather objective, narrative and personal drama of Christianity, while Heard’s more transcendent and psychological approach eventually found its home in Indian mysticism. By the mid 1930s, their views had diverged to the point when discussion between them had become awkward, and even friendship, strained. This led to a separation of the ways.

Eventually with Aldous Huxley and his friend Christopher Wood, Heard left for the USA in 1937.⁶ In California, he met Swami Prabhavananda and became involved in the study and practice of the Vedanta, the ancient Hindu scriptures.⁷ It was through Heard’s influence that such intellectuals and writers as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood became involved in the Vedanta movement.⁸ Philpot, on the other hand, remained a Catholic to the end, his sudden death occurring at age 53 in December 1937.

This memoir is undated, and in it Heard only once mentions a precise year, 1923. However, internal evidence suggests that he must have met Philpot late in 1915. Heard says they met shortly after he settled in London, which probably occurred in that year. After leaving Oxford in 1913, he had spent two years working in Sussex. A few weeks after their meeting, he had been introduced to Vivian Forbes, whom Philpot had met in August 1915. Heard also indicates that he and Philpot met before his nervous breakdown in 1916. The last dateable incident in the memoir is Philpot’s decorating the dining room at Mulberry House in 1930. After this, they met a few times, but their final meeting must have occurred around 1935, as Heard states, thirty years after their first meeting. The description in the memoir of Philpot’s dreary, temporary rooms in London accords well with that date, since he was selling Baynards and looking for accommodation in London at that time. Since Heard also states it had been a decade since he had last seen Philpot, the memoir must have been written around 1945.

Editor's note: I have silently corrected obvious spelling and typographical errors, expanded a few contractions and tidied up the punctuation, so as to facilitate reading.

- J. G. P. Delaney

Endnotes to Introduction

1 I am deeply indebted to John Roger Barrie for kindly bringing this memoir to my attention, for allowing me to edit it, for his careful proof-reading of the text and for his unfailing patience and generosity in answering my many queries. Much of the biographical material regarding Heard comes either directly from him, or from the excellent biographical account of Heard by his late father, Jay Michael Barrie, as posted on The Gerald Heard Official Website.

2 The Evening News, London, England (11 Feb 1910).

3 ‘The Making of a Picture,’ Apollo (June 1933), pp 286-7.

4 Philpot was born on the 5th, and Heard on the 6th, of October.

5 Heard’s father was the Rev. Henry James Heard (1856-1931); his grandfather, Rev. John Bickford Heard; and his elder brother, Rev. Alexander St John Heard.

6 Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) English novelist and essayist; Christopher Wood (d 1976), a pianist and close friend of Heard’s.

7 Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976), founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

8 Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), English-born American novelist, whose book A Meeting by the River is dedicated to Heard.

Memoir of Glyn Philpot

by Gerald Heard

It is now just thirty years since I first met him and it is a decade since I last saw him. Since then one has met a number of people who are considered famous and certainly are remarkable, but I am not sure that any of them have given me quite the sense of uniqueness that Glyn did. I had just come to live in London and of course had heard about him, for he was what one might call the young hope of the old side - there had suddenly appeared a young man of brilliant powers who nevertheless was a traditionalist from the start and not a revolutionary. That made him a figure of controversy at once, and of course his great power as a striking portraitist gave him another public beside the intellectuals. I had been taken to see some of his pictures already and certainly such studies as the ‘Breton fishing boy’ and the ‘head of the Negro’ were of direct appeal; they held even the most casual sight-seer.1 I was invited to meet him at the Randall Davies house.² There were no other guests and, as soon as we were dining, one forgot he was a very successful artist for of course he was as brilliant a talker as he was a painter - indeed he was essentially a personality - one whom if he had had no specific art people would have said of him that his character, his style was far more remarkable than anything he did. And that was true. That Glyn cared for his painting immensely, no one could doubt, but though he was a great worker and a fertile inventor, his art never actually consumed him - he was indeed more remarkable than it. We were once discussing Van Gogh and he remarked with something almost of impatience, ‘I could see a chair as he saw that chair he painted but I should have to be more than half mad to do so.’3 It was like all those judgements of his a shrewd one. He knew well of what lay beyond paint, to which paint is only a curtain, but he wanted to be complete; he dreaded deformity, disbalance, ill-taste.

Gerald Heard I by Glyn Philpot

oil on canvas, c. 1915

We stayed talking at the Davies’s house till late and then he asked me to walk back to his studio flat in Tite Street.4 The moment one entered it one saw how perfectly he could make every thing he touched reflect him. It was a difficult place to make look comfortable, still more gracious, but he had given it some real beauty. Indeed as one learnt, it amused him to take ugliness and, with a brilliant economy of material, to turn the dull thing into an object of peculiar distinctive quality. I stayed with him till one or past and we met very often after that. He started three paintings for which I served as model, and few things have interested me more than when - and this of course was rare - he would let one watch him actually working on them.5 The speed of his brushwork was uncanny; you felt he was, in the famous simile, simply wiping off a grey film and exposing underneath a finished brilliant picture. He had been taught at the Beaux Arts and so he had this strange flair for rapid work, seemingly able to strike out brilliant likenesses without any sketch, study or correction.6 To the lay-man it was a wonderful exhibition of sheer dexterity. Then one day he turned with his usual smile, ‘The trouble with your face,’ he said, ‘Is that at first glance it all seems on a big scale and the more one looks at it, the more one sees that in point of fact everything is really quite small.’ From that day one’s use as a model was over but we found somehow a lot of thing in common, tho it still puzzles me what he found in one’s own shape of mind. Very soon one was able to discuss with him that other great interest of his life - religion. But there, again, one came across his vastly intuitive attitude toward it. He had become, not long before, a Catholic and was, and always remained, wholly satisfied.7

I had been trained as an historian and a little as a theologian so my approach was very different.8 It did not make him wary or intolerant, and I was deeply interested to learn from him all I could of his approach and contact. He used to ask, “Why don’t you become a Catholic?” and we would then enter on those discussions which resemble, one always imagines, the kind of exchanges that would take place between a fish and a bird if they agreed to discuss the advantages and necessities of their respective positions in the world of life. Through him I met a number of people who were actually artists or connoisseurs, and so began to see something of that world which is essential[ly] non-historical because interested in immediate presentation. I had not seen anything of this world before nor understood its standpoint, and I owe to him the fact that I met the intellectual world, much of which naturally was much more extreme than his own position. One saw also his peculiar tact - part of his art of living - with personal relations. There was nothing finer in all his skills than his charm with people, and it was at its best with those people he was most with - unfortunately an uncommon progression. In a few weeks, I had met Vivian Forbes, who was to illustrate so much that was best in Glyn.9 Glyn saw in this remarkable young man a gift that was chaffing the whole body and mind to find its expression. He said to me of him, “Through Vivian I can do something in art which I couldn’t do myself”. That may well have been true: what was undoubtedly true was the fact that by his care of Vivian Forbes he brought out of himself something that was perhaps more greatly creative than any of his art work. It was not that he had in him any of the rather unresilient character of the philanthropist. It was I believe his love for getting the best out of anyone’s problems with the lightest touch and skill, to release what he could see was there - just in the same amused way, he would suddenly set about rearranging with lack of bustle but with amazing speed, someone’s uglyly arranged room, their garden, or even rescue from a clotted collapse a dinner that someone had been trying to serve from good materials but with little mastery. He could cook when he liked, as he could do anything else, as far as I know. Clothes, too, about them he had his own notions and gifts. He was always dressed perfectly but that did not make him submit to any idea that a tailor might have of smartness - I remember his emphasis on the fact that white evening waistcoats just must not be as tho they were made of ironed white paper. The texture of the cloth must show, the roll of the lapels must be natural and able to be given a just touch as you put them on, like an early 19^th century cravat - the made-up in that genre filled him with horror.10

Gerald Heard II by Glyn Philpot

oil on canvas, c. 1915

Not many months later I was ill, and he came down into the country to stay with me, where I had been lent a cottage.11 This was the first time that one had actually shared house with him. One saw the steady plan he had of his life - he read with the same delight and the same selection as he did everything else. He was then absorbed by Huysmans.12 The mixture of deep Catholic piety and detailed power of noticing the irrelevant and the macabre, fascinated him. After it was to be Proust.13 I was young and crude enough to ask why these authors absorbed him. Sometimes my questions would make him impatient, but most of the time he would be gentle and try to make me appreciate their curious richness, their appositeness to their time. Finally he said, I remember, ‘We differ about the way to take things: I’m only interested in metaphor..’; and then with a laugh, ‘and I really only like it when it’s fully mixed’. There was a lot of truth in his joke. He was involved in a double problem - he was both dramatic and also presentational - the story, the climax in things interested him, but also the beauty of actual texture. I think that made him loyal to Venice and made his art, not merely of painting but of living, so largely a recall of the late Renaissance. Those striking pictures - the ‘Statue under the Sea’, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’, the ‘Three Kings’, they were dramatic but they were also arresting studies in sheer appearances.14 I often wonder what would have happened had he not had a disappointment in the great religious picture - the ‘Christus’ he painted for Scotland.15 He told me that it was felt to be in some way inhuman and wrong. Afterwards he returned to this central problem which because it is larger than even great art may be touched on by one [who] is not an artist. He attempted that big work, the three great striding figures, and one felt that Michelangelo had come to Venice, and Rome had asked the Sea-Kings artist guest whether he might not come to the religious capital and there work at themes in which sumptuousness was lost in sublimity.16 He could have, but again the problem arises, can a man be fully-rounded and one-pointed. He had so many gifts that had he chosen one, the others must have been sacrificed.

A few months after, he had just been made an R.A., we were down staying with him at a mill-house on the north downs and again one saw his skill in living which appeared so casual but was always distinctively selective.17 He disliked scholarship, yet his information on any subject he actually wished to use was always adequate. There was nothing that would escape his attention and touch in a house - from the daily paper he would make a scrap-book of odd snapshots and paragraphs which 18 made a kind of jumble glass picture of the human kaleidoscope. When we went for a walk and he found the path dull, he would set us designing menus. Tea, one remembers, must never have sweet things but various frail toasts and sandwiches cemented with various pâtés.19

When next back in London he had moved to a house in Knightsbridge, and again he made it almost too perfect by the skill with which he arranged things nice enough in themselves but owing their charm to their detailed composition.20 Lunching there one day one met at last one of the figures which he loved to embroider - a great art critic who had always defended Glyn’s work from the moderns and who Glyn loved.21 The man was also a bon viveur, and as he was then old - he died a couple of years later - he had become very round. ‘He’s like an enormously ripe plum,’ Glyn remarked, ‘One keeps one wondering what would happen if he caught on a thorn’. That did not mean that he had anything but respect for 22 the super-plum’s judgement. ‘I don’t care what the other critics say. They don’t know what I’m trying to do. But when he said, “This last work of Philpot’s is a little disappointing”, I felt I must have been careless’.

He loved music, I think, as much as painting. The opera would have kept him alone from ever being content with the country. The ballet, though, I think, meant most to him. He greatly valued a painting which he made of Nijinsky as Oedipus confronting the Sphinx.23 It had about it a quality which may mean nothing to artists but which was present in so many of his paintings and which gave them a quality which balanced that sense of sumptuousness which I have called Venetian - instead of the rich golden lights there was the cold of the moon over it all. The music he composed was, however, without this quality. It brought out still another side of his nature - His ‘Little Lamb who made Thee’ was one felt a perfect setting for Blake’s poem, which moves as all Blake’s work does move on that edge which can either lapse into Pathos or go over - as Wordsworth lost the power to go - out into a world of awe and even terror.24 There he showed, and in one or two other snatches, a perfect simplicity and directness, that innocency which isn’t stupidity or inexperience but the incapacity to be nocuous, mean or frightened. Once discussing Opera with an enthusiast he said, ‘“The Magic Flute” is of course the best because the music and the theme can go together for there is no attempt at realism.’25 Yet he would never reject Wagner and indeed all his life he was determined that fantasy and sanity, beautifully ordered common sense and this-world plenty should go with the transcendent.26 It was clear, one almost says inevitable, that he could have been a writer. I often asked him to do so. He always said that to do it as he would, would take too much of his time. I think, tho, the reason was that narrative and picture are in contrast to each other, one must choose one way or the other, if not of looking at life at least of rendering one’s impression of it. And all his life he was skilfully, quietly, but none the less unrestingly working, one might almost say wrestling with that problem of decoration, design and significance, story, description. In the end, I think portraits really had come to tire him. The great Salisbury is a command piece.27 The picture of old Bishop Gore suddenly seemed to recall him to his interest in a set subject and indeed the old theologian’s sad face I think stirred real sympathy in the artist.28

One hot night in ‘23 we were all asked to go to the new studio flat in Holland Park.29 Here at last Glyn seemed to have a place which was not a problem asking for the assistance of a genius but a house which lent itself to his skill. He made it a wonderful place, and I always felt it suited him better than any other. Every object, that book, this picture, the arrangement of flowers, was of interest. But he was not quite happy with it and began to want the country. Then he had his most entertaining adventure with a house.30 One recalls coming in to see him and he looking up to say, ‘Here’s a place which they are advertising as suitable for an institution - they mean for a quiet secluded mental-home.’ It certainly was forbidding enough, and never did he make a more brilliant facelifting operation on a poor collapsed piece of mid XIX pretension. It was the last house I knew him in. Our friendship had gaps - there were spaces when I was away, he away and others when we were taken up with issues in which the other had nothing to give. But we would meet again and his vividness would start us off where we had begun years back.

The last time, the last stretch was when coming down from Cambridge where I’d been staying with Lowes Dickenson - Cambridge and Bloomsbury had made a kind of alliance against the Royal Academy Chelsea and the traditionalists, and I was then once again much with Cambridge.31 I had got into the carriage, which was full when, as the train began to start, a man hurried up, entered and then saw no place to put his suitcase and little to sit. Looking up, I saw it was Glyn, asked him to put his suitcase under my seat and to sit beside me. He was as gay as ever, came to see where I was then living with Christopher Wood, and, they too liking each other, we saw once again one another frequently. The last spell together was when Wood and I picked him up at Chartres and Christopher drove him and me through the west of France down to Carcasonne - that fantastic reconstructed medieval fortress town which stands like a frontier castle between the Atlantic side of France and the Mediterranean.32 We arrived at night and in a storm of rain and Glyn, as we found rooms in the hotel, had a telegram from Paris asking him to come as soon as possible. It was from Vivian Forbes, and so my last tour with him closed - as had the one before I had taken with him to Italy with his hurrying off that he might be of use to a friend.33 Actually my last sight of him was a number of years after. He would send for me now and then suddenly - once when he had, as it were, gone to ground in a strange house in that strange desert of houses to the west of Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was a place almost sinister, for it had no windows - only skylights and was filled with rather dusty divans and old rugs on the lightless walls. He hadn’t troubled to alter it - he was simply resting for a little. Again he called for me to come to him when he had taken a brief refuge by going to bed in one of those huge hotels that tower up at the south west end of Kensington gardens.34 It was winter and he had drawn the curtains and was reading by a shaded light. I asked him what was wrong. He smiled away the enquiry and I never suspected that he might actually be seriously exhausted. I never heard him complain of his health or anything else, tho often about other things he would have sudden keen moments of protest, which generally broke down into laughter. The last time I spent an unbroken hour or two with him alone was, I think, when he as usual suddenly rang up and asked if I would come down and sit with him while he worked - I was to go to a lovely house in one of the small squares not far from Westminster Abbey.35 On arriving, I found he had the house to himself and was shown up to a very fine dining room. He was decorating it for a friend - all in that what I have called his moonlight tone - silvers, greens and blues. One saw in the big designs he was sketching on the walls with that wonderful readiness of technique which he commanded, the beginning of his next effort - the attempt he made to achieve a kind of bridge between the classic tradition which he loved and the new thought in art. He did not, I knew, think he had succeeded, but nevertheless he felt that the effort was worth while. After all nothing is more remarkable - it has been pointed out by all great historians of art - than the fact that often from those who cling longest to a style which most practitioners of their age have abandoned, comes - as with Bach for instance, a final flowering of the old stock which produces a yield which in its way can never be surpassed.36

His taste was certainly catholic. In Chinese work he had a special pleasure, always picking up small pieces of carving which had given him pleasure. Once when I was ill in bed, he called and put beside me a Chinese carving of a duck, done in some smoky crystal, with a spray of lotus in its mouth. “I’m going to leave that with you while you are in bed, it will cheer you up. Don’t you see, it’s so like the delicate way that Daisy eats a piece of spaghetti.”37 He could be biting too in a humorous way. He knew I had a young critic friend who had said hard things about his art, a man who too was of no little elegance and with something of Glyn’s love of textures - “Do you know what I think of, when I think of him?” he asked me (They had incidentally never met) “I think of a piece of rather worn velvet lying in the corner of a dusty drawer.”38

Toward the end of my time in England, I saw him just once or twice. Then I heard from a friend we had in common that his doctor was really alarmed about him and had ordered him complete rest.39 I wanted to go and see him but he did not wish to be visited. My friend Christopher Wood, however, did get permission to see him. He recovered from that attack and then I saw him for the last time. He came in for a moment unexpectedly to see Christopher. We talked for a little and, as far as I remember, Christopher had to go out. The talk turned to religion. It grew grave: we came to a deadlock - not so much on theology as on the issues from which theology rises and the acute problems of actual conduct. I felt a great sense of sadness come over me for then though I did not know that I was leaving London for years, I did feel that somehow our friendship had reached its close. I went with him to the lift. As he stepped in, he turned round, broke into his laugh, smiled and waved his hand. I know that he knew better than I that something had come to an end but he would not let it close in anything as heavy as gloom. He was right, for differences are not the fundamental things of life - agreements are more powerful, and as one looks back, it is in his charm and generosity, his gifts and power of happiness that one finds that he is living.

Endnotes to Memoir

1 In 1914, Philpot did two paintings for which a French soldier modelled. One, entitled A Young Breton, or A Breton Boy (Tate Gallery, was exhibited at the RA in 1917, while the other, entitled Guillaume Rolland, a Young Breton, or Apache (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), was shown at the International Society Exhibition in 1914 and the Venice Biennale in 1922. The powerful Head of a Negro (1912-13), first exhibited as ‘Billy’ at the Modern Society of Portrait Painters in 1913, was the first of a long series of paintings of black men by Philpot.

2 Randall Davies (1866-1946), writer and collector, whom Philpot first met in July 1910 and whose portrait he painted c 1912.

3 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), whose famous painting Van Gogh’s Chair (National Gallery, London) was done in 1888.

4 Philpot’s studio was at 33 Tite Street from 1912 to 1923.

5 Philpot did two head sketches of Heard, painted by artificial light one evening after dinner, probably in 1915. When Heard left England for the USA, he gave them to a friend of his and Philpot’s, the painter Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987). He in turn gave one to Heard’s secretary and executor Jay Michael Barrie (1912-2001), while the other was sold by a London dealer.

6 In Paris in 1905, Philpot actually studied at the Académie Julian, rather than at the Beaux Arts, but his teacher, Jean Paul Laurens (1838-1921), taught (and probably used the same techniques) at both institutions.

7 According to his niece, Gabrielle Cross, Philpot became a Catholic shortly after he turned twenty-one in Oct 1905, but no supporting evidence for this date has been found.

8 Heard had studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge from 1908 to 1911, and stayed on there until 1913 to study theology on a college scholarship given to those preparing to take Anglican Orders.

9 Vivian Forbes (1891-1937), artist who did drawings and watercolours of distinction. Having met Philpot in the army in August 1915, he became increasingly dependant both financially and emotionally on Philpot, and committed suicide shortly after Philpot’s funeral.

10 Heard is probably referring to Philpot’s distaste for ready-made ties, as opposed to those hand-tied by the wearer himself.

11 The cottage is unidentified, as is the date of this visit.

12 Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), whose best-known novel À Rebours (1884) became the ‘breviary of the Decadents’ and influenced Oscar Wilde and others. Huysmans’ partly autobiographical works reflect many of the intellectual movements of the late 19th century and eventually describe his return to the Catholic Church.

13 Marcel Proust (1871-1922) whose autobiographical masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, an attempt to recover a lost past by stimulating unconscious memory, was published between 1913 and 1927.

14 Under the Sea (1914-18), exhibited International Society, 1916; Belshazzar’s Feast (1913), exhibited International Society, 1913; Adoration of the Three Kings (1918) (Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts), exhibited Royal Academy, 1918.

15 The Sacred Heart Altarpiece was painted in 1922 for St Peter’s Catholic church, Edinburgh, where Father John Gray, poet and friend of Oscar Wilde as well as of Philpot, was pastor. Due to a misunderstanding, the same subject had already been painted for the church by the Scottish painter, Malcolm Drummond, so Philpot’s painting was not needed. After Philpot’s death, it was given to a monastery near Margate, where it was destroyed in the collapse of the building where it was being stored.

16 In The Journey of the Spirit (1921), which shows three nude male figures striding across a strange, barren, landscape, Philpot tries to represent more generalized, cosmic, ideas in a Symbolist style, rather than the specific biblical references of his earlier paintings. Critics rightly saw the influence of Michelangelo in these muscular figures. Heard’s point is that this monumental quality, so evident in Michelangelo’s sculpture and his great works like the Sistine Chapel in Rome, is combined with the earlier influence on Philpot of Venetian art, with its love of colour, of gorgeous fabrics and of surface quality in general.

17 Philpot was elected ARA in 1915 and RA in 1923. The cottage on the north downs has not been identified.

18 The word ‘with’ in the text has been emended to ‘which’.

19 For afternoon tea, Philpot would have pâté de foie gras, and on one occasion during the war when he invited six soldiers, he had caviare and cake.

20 5 Park Row, Knightsbridge, where Philpot lived from 1919 to 1923.

21 The ‘great art critic’ was probably Paul G. Konody (1872-1933), who published an appreciative article, “The Art of Glyn Philpot,” Drawing and Design, 3 new series 41 (Sept 1923) 577-9, 588-97, as well as numerous perceptive and favourable reviews of his exhibited work. The ‘disappointing’ painting has not been identified. As Philpot became an R.A. in April 1923, and left Knightsbridge for his new flat in Holland Park in late May 1923, this dinner seems to have taken place in late April/early May 1923, possibly when Konody was researching his article on Philpot. Konody actually lived another ten years.

22 The word ‘from’ in the text has been emended to ‘for’.

23 Philpot did several portraits of the great ballet dancer, Vaclav Nijinski (1890-1950), which were exhibited at the Fine Art Society, London, in March 1914. A great lover of classical ballet and especially the Ballets Russes, he also painted a number of other dancers.

24 Philpot set this and other poems by William Blake (1757-1827) to music. In his Intimations of Immortality (published in 1807), William Wordsworth (1770-1850) explores the meaning of his early intense experiences of childhood and their gradual fading as he grew older.

25 The Magic flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) has an entirely fantastic fairy-tale plot with light, comic elements.

26 The music of Richard Wagner (1813-83) is based on a heavier machinery of Teutonic mythology. Heard’s point seems to be that Philpot’s tastes in music, as in other things, were very catholic, and not dogmatic.

27 Philpot’s large state portrait of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury (1917), was received with acclamation by the critics and the public when exhibited at the RA in that year.

28 Philpot’s portrait (1920) of Rt Hon. Charles Gore, D.D., Bishop of Oxford, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1921.

29 Philpot and Forbes took over the flat in Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Rd in May 1923. It was built as flats for artists with large north-facing studios and had been formerly occupied by the artists Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) and Charles Shannon (1863-1937), who had both influenced Philpot’s early work.

30 In 1927, Philpot bought Baynards Manor, a large brick mock-Tudor house, which had been divided into 3 cottages and which he restored to its original state. Because of the financial difficulties that followed his change of style, he was obliged to sell it in 1935.

31 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson (1862-1932), Cambridge don, historian and humanitarian, who promoted the establishment of the League of Nations (whose name he may have invented) and who wrote the Introduction to Heard’s The Ascent of Humanity. His biography was written by E. M. Forster (1934).

32 This trip from Chartres to Carcasonne probably took place in t931-2, while Philpot was living in Paris.

33 This trip to Baveno and Gardone on the Italian lakes took place in May 1925, and from there Philpot and Heard then visited Bologna together.

34 The strange house and the hotels are unidentified, but the former sojourn may have occurred in 1935 when Philpot was selling Baynards and looking for a flat in London.

35 In 1930, Philpot decorated the dining room of Mulberry House, Smith Square, Westminster, London, which belonged to his friends and patrons, the Lord and Lady Melchett. For this, he was paid 1200 pounds in November, 1930.

36 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), German baroque composer who clung to the Renaissance style of polyphony while his contemporaries had turned to chords and melody.

37 In 1916, Heard had suffered a nervous breakdown and a long illness afterwards. It was probably during this period that Glyn visited him. Daisy Philpot (1881-1957), Glyn’s devoted elder sister, who acted as his secretary and housekeeper.

38 The young critic is unidentified.

39 Philpot suffered from high blood pressure and a hectic schedule, and was several times ordered to rest in the latter part of his life.

J. G. P. Delaney obtained his Ph.D. at Edinburgh University. He is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at Université de Moncton, Moncton, N.B., Canada. Professor Delaney is author of Charles Ricketts, A Biography (Oxford, 1990) and Glyn Philpot, His Life and Art (London, 1999), as well as numerous articles and pamphlets.

The Barrie Family Trust is most grateful to Professor J. G. P. Delaney for his kind permission to republish his article, Gerald Heard's Memoir of Glyn Philpot (c 1945) and its accompanying portrait, which originally appeared The British Art Journal, Vol. IV, No. 2, Summer 2003. Introduction, textual emendations, and footnotes are Copyright © 2003 by Professor J. G. P. Delaney, All Rights Reserved. Text of Memoir of Glyn Philpot is Copyright © 2003 by The Barrie Family Trust, All Rights Reserved. Image of Gerald Heard I is Copyright by The Glyn Philpot Estate. Image of Gerald Heard II is Copyright by The Barrie Family Trust.

O'Keeffe's Arboreal Portraits

of D. H. Lawrence and Gerald Heard

by Brenda Mitchell, Ph.D.

Two largely ignored paintings from Georgia O'Keeffe's oeuvre, D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree and Gerald's Tree I, bring up several important issues concerning O'Keeffe's disguised portraits and her close relationships with literary figures. In both paintings O'Keeffe has portrayed male writers (men of culture) as trees, an apparent paradox from a woman linked to the world of nature by her contemporaries and even by the artist herself.1O'Keeffe once wrote: "I feel like a little plant that he [husband Alfred Stieglitz] has watered and weeded and dug around—and he seems to have been able to grow himself—without anyone watering or weeding or digging around him."2 She later distanced herself from the world of culture, especially literature, declaring to painters Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, "I am quite illiterate."3 Yet she lived at the center of American avant-garde art production, and included in her library were major works of philosophy and literature, as well as art theory by, among others, Clive Bell and Wassily Kandinsly (in whose Concerning the Spiritual in Art O'Keeffe would have encountered Theosophy). The apparent paradox begins to disappear when we recognize that her subjects in these paintings, British novelist D. H. Lawrence and Irish writer Gerald Heard themselves experienced ambivalence toward the world of culture, and that O'Keeffe's symbolic portrayals placed her squarely in the mainstream of American Modernism.

"Georgia O'Keeffe painting in her car, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1937"

Photograph by Ansel Adams.

Used by kind permission of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Center for Creative Photography.

In this distinguished photograph, taken by world-renown photographer Ansel Adams,

Ms. O'Keeffe, graced with an enigmatic half-smile, is captured painting "Gerald's Tree."

Although they have been discussed in the O'Keeffe literature, the portrait aspects of D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree and Gerald's Tree I have been overlooked.4 While at first these images seem to have little in common, the subjects to which they refer shared important similarities: Like Toomer, Lawrence and Heard were writers interested in mysticism who traveled to New Mexico, and were strongly ambivalent to the world of industrial technology and culture. Toomer followed Gurdjieff; Lawrence was interested in Theosophy; and Heard was involved with Hinduism and Buddhism.

During the late 1930s O'Keeffe met three writers at Ghost Ranch (a dude ranch that accepted guests)—Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood—each with significant interest in Eastern religions and metaphysics. Huxley and Heard were there in the summer of 1937, and Isherwood passed through on his way to California two years later. Heard had published The Source of Civilization two years earlier, and two years later, he published his ideas on the evolution of consciousness in Pain, Sex, and Time.5 O'Keeffe found Heard's footprints around the tree where he had been dancing, as well as a cryptic inscription he had etched into the earth at the base of the tree. "Gerald's Tree was one of many dead cedars out in the bare, red hills of Ghost Ranch," O'Keeffe wrote. A friend [Heard] visiting the Ranch that summer had evidently found it and from the footmarks I guessed he must have been dancing around the tree before I started to paint it. So I always thought of it as Gerald's Tree."6 She painted two versions of the tree, indicating its importance to her.

"Gerald's Tree I" by Georgia O'Keeffe

oil on canvas, 1937, 40" x 30 1/8".

Gift of the Burnett Foundation.

Used by kind permission of Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

In contrast to the dramatic nocturnal view of D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree, O'Keeffe has viewed the spiky dead cedar of Gerald's Tree I head-on in brilliant daylight against an orange mountain. Her description of Heard's behavior at the site hints that the tree may have marked a personal sacred space for both writer and painter. In fact, the shadow at the base of the tree resembles a figure of a man dancing, with his arms spread wide.

The fact that Gerald's Tree I depicts a dead cedar, rather than the "erect, alive" pine of the Lawrence portrait, probably carries symbolic meaning as well. Painted eight years after The Lawrence Tree, the dead tree may symbolize Heard's sense of impending destruction, for he was even more convinced than Lawrence that modern technological society was bound for collapse. While in Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence proposed nature as a refuge from technology, Heard's solution was to turn from the material world to the inner spiritual life. Given his spiritual leanings, it is possible that Heard was engaged in a kind of shamanic activity with regard to the dead cedar. According to Nevill Drury, trees, in the form of the World Tree and the Tree of Life, carry important symbolic meaning in shamanic religions, Norse mythology, and the Jewish mystical Kabbala.7

Heard feared for the survival of civilization, predicting complete destruction if civilization did not take steps to save itself. Writing during the rise of fascism and Stalinism, Heard described the condition of contemporary culture as a "problem," "in crisis," and a "dilemma," if not caused, then exacerbated, by the use of technology to create armaments. These "crises" stemmed from Western culture's emphasis on the outer world of culture while neglecting the inner world (or the "extra-individuality" of humans, to use Heard's term). Heard called for the integration of these worlds in order to avert the coming disaster. Believing that Eastern cultures had set an example in the development of the "inner world," Heard proposed the practice of yoga as an empirical means of integrating inner human psychology and external society. He wrote:

Yoga solves the problem of the self-divided individual, that of the individual

and society and that of consciousness and Life and indeed the universe, through the single solution of making the individual learn how to achieve knowledge of his extra-individuality....Society is the macrocosm, the

projection of its constituent psyches. When they are fissured, society is chaotic, anarchic. When the inner psychological conflict is resolved the

outer order, social justice, economic health, result.8

Heard further developed his ideas on the evolution of consciousness in Pain, Sex and Time, published on the eve of World War II. Here he focuses on Eastern thought and Western mysticism and calls for psychic evolution using examples of mysticism throughout history. Once again proposing yoga as a method for achieving heightened consciousness, Heard also discusses extrasensory perception, telepathy, and clairvoyance, and concludes that the development of psychic powers is necessary to "save civilization."9 Like Lawrence and Toomer, and to a certain extent even Stieglitz, Heard rejected Western technological society, which had produced one World War and was about to spawn another. His beliefs, which he likely discussed with O'Keeffe and others, supported the notion of the "artist as seer," or clairvoyant, who sees what others do not—as O'Keeffe the artist saw "photographically real" portraits that passed into the world unrecognized.

O'Keeffe also enjoyed playing jokes on "the men," as she called her art world contemporaries, and she enjoyed having secrets—knowing something about the meaning of a painting that no one else would discern. O'Keeffe's arboreal portraits expressed her admiration for these writers, and at the same time tweaked the noses of the art critics. For while critics trumpeted the female sexuality of her flowers, they did not notice the phallic imagery of the trees, nor did they recognize them as portraits. Georgia O'Keeffe was not just a woman of nature painting trees: She was a sophisticated artist participating in an intellectual dialogue with the artistic and philosophical issues occupying some of the most interesting thinkers of her generation.

Endnotes to O'Keeffe

Note: A version of this article was presented at the Midwest Art History Society Meeting, March 1994, and appeared as a chapter in "Music that Makes Holes in the Sky: Georgia O'Keeffe's Visionary Romanticism" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1996). I thank Sarah Burns and Katherine Manthorne for their help.

- Brenda Mitchell

1 Anthropologist Sherry Ortner's essay, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University, 1974, 67-87), provided a point of departure for some of my interpretations of O'Keeffe's arboreal portraits of male writers. Ortner defined "culture" as a "special sort of process in the world." She further explained that women were identified with "nature," which every culture devalues as being of a lower order than "culture." O'Keeffe and the subjects of her portraits, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, and Gerald Heard, all shared an ambivalence about the superiority of "culture" even while "generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence."

2 Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 19871, 183.

3 Ibid., 222.

4 Charles Eldredge discusses D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree in Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern (New Haven: Yale University, 1993) 198, 219. Because the painting was originally exhibited as Pine Tree with Stars at Brett's, Eldredge identifies it as an homage to O'Keeffe's friend Lady Dorothy Brett, who stayed in New Mexico after the Lawrences returned to Europe. According to Eldredge, "Titles of O'Keeffe's works often changed over time, a circumstance that complicates research....The alterations in nomenclature occasionally were made by her, but more often by others." He quotes the artist: "I don't put names on them. I never do." I believe that this statement, together with the fact that O'Keeffe used the title The Lawrence Tree in her 1976 book, invalidates the Eldredge identification. O'Keeffe may not have given the painting its original title. In addition, O'Keeffe mentioned the painting in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1929, referring to it as "that tree in Lawrences front yard as you see it when you lie under it on the table"; Cowart, Hamilton, Greenough, Art and Letters, 192.

5 Gerald Heard, The Source of Civilization (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), and Pain, Sex and Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939).*

6 Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe (New York: Viking, 1976), n. p.

7 Nevill Drury, The Elements of Shamanism (Dorset, Eng.: Element Books, 1989), 24.

8 Heard, The Source of Civilization, 235.

9 Heard, Pain, Sex and Time, 261.*

Brenda Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her current research interests include Contemporary Japanese Art, Art and Identity, and Feminism in the Visual Arts. She has been the recipient of two teaching and research fellowships in the Center for Developmental Psychology and Psychiatry, School of Education, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.

The Barrie Family Trust is most grateful to Professor Brenda Mitchell for her kind permission to republish excerpts from her article, O'Keeffe's Arboreal Portraits of D. H. Lawrence and Gerald Heard, which originally appeared in Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2. (Autumn, 1998 - Winter, 1999), pp. 3-7. Text is Copyright © 1998 by Brenda M. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved. Professor Mitchell’s article is accessible online at JSTOR.

* Pain, Sex and Time was reissued in 2004 by Monkfish Book Publishing.

More on Gerald's Tree

by Professor Brenda M. Mitchell

O'Keeffe described this painting in her 1976 book Georgia O'Keeffe (The Viking Press, New York, plate #90) wherein she wrote that her "friend" had been dancing around it. There is another interesting piece of information in Georgia O'Keeffe: Selected Paintings and Works on Paper, published by the Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, 1986:

Plate #23: Gerald's Tree II—includes an exhibition history and provenance, a reference to Heard's 1937 visit to Ghost Ranch, and an excerpt from a letter she wrote to Stieglitz:

    "I found this written on some hard smooth sand in the shade of a tree

     where he [Gerald Heard] had been walking -

                       Do not act as though                Know that you
                       you were in the             be       are in the presence
                                                                   and you will "

That was the cryptic message she found, with its unusual spacing.

A response from The Barrie Family Trust: The "Do not act" admonition is a typical Heardian warning. Heard frequently and over time used the term "Presence" to indicate the transcendent, ultimate Reality. The phrases "Know" and "and you will" are quintessential Heardian resolutions peppered with encouragement. O'Keeffe's testimony thus bears the unmistakable ring of authenticity. Heard must have been in a heightened state of ecstasy at the time when he interacted with this tree, the desert, and his deity.

"More on Gerald's Tree" used by kind permission of Professor Brenda M. Mitchell. Copyright © 2007 by Brenda M. Mitchell. All rights reserved.

Notes on the Prehistory of the Human Potential Movement:

The Vedanta Society and Gerald Heard's Trabuco College

by Timothy Miller, Ph.D.

From its beginning in 1962 the Esalen Institute has been known as, among other things, a meeting ground between East and West – “something of a center-point for the translation of Asian religions into American culture,” as Jeffrey Kripal has put it.¹ Some of the foundations for that reputation are fairly well known to those with at least a cursory familiarity with Esalen’s history and programs. That Esalen co-founders Michael Murphy and Richard Price were influenced—one might say inspired—by Frederic Spiegelberg at Stanford University; that they became involved with the nascent American Academy of Asian Studies, where they came into contact with other Asianists, including Alan Watts; that Esalen early on presented workshops and seminars that promoted East-West encounter: those things are familiar parts of the record. But history is a complex tapestry of influences, and in the case of Esalen those influences go beyond Spiegelberg and Watts and the Academy of Asian Studies. This paper seeks to bring to light another part of the Asian-American encounter that helped make Esalen what it finally became.

Walter Truett Anderson, in his history of Esalen, provides a brief but intriguing glimpse of one group of persons who helped Murphy and Price as they worked to refine their vision of what would become Esalen: Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and others who were, in Anderson’s words, “members of the sizable circle of Southern California students of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy.”² Particularly important, in Anderson’s account, was Gerald Heard, a close friend of Huxley’s who had himself founded a center that in many ways portended Esalen. Heard’s proto-Esalen (about which more presently) had closed in 1947 after just five years of operation, but Heard maintained a passionate interest in human growth, human potential, for the rest of his life. Here is Anderson’s depiction of Heard’s passion as experienced by Murphy and Price in 1961, as they were trying to put their plan together:

Huxley had so diffidently advocated a research project, had so hesitantly suggested its revolutionary possibilities. He thought something of that sort might happen. Heard thought it had to happen. Mankind, he believed, was at the turning point and could be saved from destruction only by a great leap, a new vision. There would have to be a psychological revolution, and, yes, there would have to be institutions to serve it. He had written of the need for "gymnasia for the mind" and in the 1940s had launched his own version in Southern California, a spiritual/educational center called Trabuco College. It had failed, but Heard remained irrepressibly optimistic about the prospects for new undertakings, new horizons, vast evolutionary transformations. He was a man of limitless energies, a brilliant and tireless talker. He welcomed the two young visitors, and they had a long conversation, a stunning four-hour exploration of evolutionary theory, biology, theology, philosophy. They spoke of many things, all connected to Heard’s vision of a huge transformation of the human species that was, he was sure, trying to take place.

Murphy and Price came away from the meeting feeling—as people who entered into conversation with Gerald Heard had often felt—a slight buzzing in the head, a certain overloading of the mental circuits. Yet it had been an invigorating and positive experience. Until then their project had been tinged with uncertainty, with a maybe-it-will-work-out-and-maybe-it-won’t sort of doubtfulness that naturally accompanies thoughts of risky new ventures into the unknown. But Heard’s enthusiasm, his sense of a cosmic mandate, changed all that. Murphy and Price were now both filled with a new sense of urgent conviction about their project: it would happen. It seemed to them, that day, that it had to happen.³

In a more recent conversation with me, Murphy confirmed Heard’s influence on him, and said that forty-two years later he still had vivid memories of that pivotal four-hour conversation. Heard’s vision of the possibilities for the evolution of human nature, and his wedding of the evolutionary to the mystical parts of the human psyche, made a powerful impact on Murphy. Just as Huxley’s language about human potential helped shape the philosophy that would drive Esalen, Heard’s insights into the human mind and passion for centers where spiritual and moral evolution could be fostered helped round out the founding vision. So perhaps Heard could be called the catalyst of Esalen: Murphy and Price came away from that day with Heard “absolutely on fire,” as Murphy put it, and firmly determined to found the Esalen Institute.

Title	Contributor/Author	Date Posted
Gerald Heard's Memoir of Glyn Philpot	J. G. P. Delaney, Ph.D.	November 25, 2005

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