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Glyn Warren Philpot, whom Mary Borden includes in her Flamingo: A Novel (1927), was a leading society portraitist in London. However, his subject pictures and male figure studies stirred considerable controversy due to their sexual nature. The daughter of a Chicago millionaire, Borden herself moved to London with her first husband in 1913. Already a published author, she was active in avant-garde intellectual circles and became involved in the suffragette movement. She had an affair with the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis while her husband was out of the country and divorced him in 1918 in order to marry a British officer whom she had met while running a field hospital during the First World War. Indeed, many of her books deal with illicit affairs and are semiautobiographical in nature. In her lifetime, Borden published over twenty books, the most famous being The Forbidden Zone (1929), a memoir of her war experiences.

Gallery label for A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions (Yale Center for British Art, 2017-06-01 - 2017-08-13)