Philpot trained at Lambeth Art School and in the Paris studio of Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. He quickly established himself as a successful society portraitist in the years before the First World War. A devout Catholic, he also painted classical and religious subject pictures. He was elected as an Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1915 and an Academician in 1923, following his first retrospective exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, London. In 1931, he moved to Paris and dedicated himself to sculpture. When he resumed painting, he made the courageous step of embracing modernist influences in his art, producing a body of work marked by a new simplicity of form and technique.