God blessed him and forgive him for his kind heart and human nature from his poor servant Henry.”More seriously, Philpot was driven almost to distraction by one Vivian Forbes, whom he met while serving in the First World War, and who clung to him tenaciously until his death, often in a parlous emotional state. In the past, Forbes has been described as Philpot’s “life-long partner”, but this, Delaney discovered, was not the true nature of their relationship at all. Instead, an early close friendship with a shared passion for art degenerated into dependency as Forbes became increasingly demanding and unstable.Philpot supported him in dubious projects – for example, his attempts to adopt young boys – and helped him win painting commissions, including one for a mural in St Stephen’s Hall at the Houses of Parliament. (He completed most of it himself after Forbes had a nervous breakdown.) Forbes’s misery was perfectly real, however: soon after Philpot’s death, he took a fatal dose of sleeping tablets in the room where his friend had died.Throughout the 1920s Philpot travelled widely, working in the US, Europe and North Africa in a spirit of exhilaration and restlessness.

He tackled religious and history painting (he had converted to Catholicism as a young man), and increasingly themes which “allowed” the inclusion of male nudes. At the young age of 38, he was elected a Royal Academician.Then in 1930, in his late forties, Philpot suddenly and very seriously went modern. He had been unmoved by the avant-garde, but now felt an urgent desire to develop a new style. He lightened his palette, abandoned rich paint surfaces, simplified and stylised his compositions.Critics berated him and portrait commissions dried up.

His The Great Pan was sensationally rejected by the Royal Academy in 1933. He clung on tenaciously, worked feverishly and gradually won back public opinion. In his last five years he held four one-man shows, compared with just two in the previous 22 years But the battle took its toll on his health. After his death in 1937 at 53, Philpot’s reputation dwindled. Daisy continued to champion his work, and when she died in the 1950s that role was assumed by his niece. In 1985, the National Portrait Gallery staged a major retrospective.