Portrait bust of Anthony Butts, 1925
Gladys Hynes 1888-1958
‘Portrait Bust of Anthony Butts’ (1925) is a carved wooden portrait sculpture by Gladys Hynes, an artist whose work has only recently begun to attract sustained scholarly attention after decades of relative obscurity. Although Hynes worked across a wide range of media—including painting, illustration, stage design, and sculpture—and exhibited internationally, notably at the Venice Biennale, she is best known today for her paintings and illustrations. This sculpture is therefore significant as a rare example of her work in other mediums.
The bust reflects Hynes’s interest in psychological portraiture. Rather than idealising the sitter, she focuses on conveying Anthony Butts’s individuality and presence, producing a characterful likeness that aligns with broader developments in modernist portrait sculpture during this period. The work also speaks to the interconnected artistic and intellectual circles of 1920s Britain, of which both artist and sitter were a part.
Born in Indore in 1888 to an Irish family, Hynes studied in London before continuing her training at the Newlyn School in Cornwall. She moved within progressive cultural networks associated with Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops, supported the women’s suffrage movement, and was active in Irish republican causes. Across her career, her work engaged with questions of gender, social change, and modernist aesthetics, making ‘Portrait Bust of Anthony Butts’ an important example of her wider artistic practice.
Gladys Hynes 1888-1958
Gladys Hynes was born in Indore, India, emigrating to London with her family in 1891. She later studied at the London School of Art in Earl’s Court where she developed a close friendship with Nina Hamnett. After her family moved to Penzance in 1906, she attended the Stanhope Forbes School of Painting, Newlyn. She returned to London in 1919, where she settled in Hampstead, taking lodgings with the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker. Hynes was a supporter of the Irish Republican cause (her correspondence with Desmond Fitzgerald is the subject of an article by Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian 26.03.2016). A member of the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, she was also an impassioned campaigner for women’s rights, often challenging the social construction of gender and sexuality in her work. Many of the paintings she produced during WWII were influenced by Surrealism and shaped by her mainly pacifist convictions. During her career, Hynes contributed to Roger Fry’s (1866-1934) Omega Workshops, illustrated books – including the folio edition of Ezra Pound’s A Draft of the Cantos nos. XVII to XXVII (1928) – undertook sculpture commissions and theatre designs. She exhibited with the Royal Academy, the London Group, the International Society of Sculptors, the Paris Salon and at the 1924 Venice Biennale.
