The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased from the artist by Hubert Wellington (1879–1967), from whom bought for £420 by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest in 1956 and presented to Tate Gallery.

Edwardian Interior is painted in artists’ oil paints on primed, stretched, plain, fine-weave linen cloth. ‘H Gilman 19 Fitzroy St’ has been written in ink in bold letters across the top stretcher bar. The canvas retains its selvedge on the right side and is unevenly cut along the three other edges. It is probably sized but no layer is easily visible and the yellowed white priming penetrates through the close weave to the back in places. The priming covers all the canvas, retains the weave texture and appears to have been applied before stretching. It is composed of a single layer of lead white with kaolin and chalk and possible traces of other extenders. This basic type of canvas and preparation is consistent in all of Gilman’s paintings in the Tate collection. It is difficult to ascertain whether Gilman bought canvas, primer and stretchers and primed the length of canvas, cutting it up and stretching it as he required, or if the canvas was purchased ready primed and stretched by the artist onto bought stretchers. It is fair to say, however, that they reflect a consciously economical choice of materials.

The painting was executed over an extended period of time working both wet-in-wet and wet-on-dry paint. No evidence of any preparatory drawing remains visible beneath the multiple layers of paint. The paint is applied in a fairly fluid state and the handling remains clearly visible over most of the surface with its distinct, soft brushmarking and low impasto. Gilman strove to keep the application of new paint as fresh and clean as possible although the many minor modifications he made in adjusting outlines and colours are retained in the topography of the paint surface. Details such as the features of the sitter and contents of the room appear to be secondary to the realisation of the subtle tonality of the fall of light, which is rendered with dextrous application that maintains an even focus across the picture surface. The build-up of multiple layers of paint has resulted in fine contraction cracks and wrinkling in the paint, which are visible in the darkest colours. The painting is covered with a layer of varnish applied over the remnants of earlier varnishes. Some of the earliest varnish may have been applied by Gilman to seal and wet-out earlier work before continuing to paint.

Harold Gilman painted this picture at his parents’ home at the Rectory in Snargate, Kent, where his father was the local vicar. Standing next to the church, the Rectory was built in 1891 and first occupied by Gilman’s father. After his father’s death in 1917 it was sold, and so he was the only rector to live there; it has since been known as The Old Rectory.1 The painting shows Gilman’s youngest sister Irene Beatrice Gilman (1877–1944) seated in the drawing room. According to her daughter, Betty Powell, Irene was a frequent model for her brother.2 She also appears in Tate’s Lady on a Sofa (Tate N05831). Irene was apparently Harold’s favourite sister, and they were very close. She was nicknamed ‘The Imp’ by her family, as she was very small, and this explains why it has been thought to be a young girl in this picture, when in fact she was about thirty when it was painted.

There is a group of oriental items on a lacquer cabinet in the corner of the room, including two vases, still in the family’s possession, a bowl and a figure on a stand. These may have been sent back by Gilman’s brother Leofric, who worked in Hong Kong until 1914.3 However, they may have been products of the family’s longer-standing connections with the Far East; Gilman’s grandfather Ellis had founded a tea company in Hong Kong.4 Gilman was often to paint figures turned away in profile, but this extreme example where the figure is virtually facing the wall seems rather strange; it could be that Irene is contemplating the objects. Gilman’s widow Sylvia was unable to identify any of the pictures on the wall, although she wrote that the family ‘had many photographs and early watercolours’.5 However, the picture seen hanging at the top left of Edwardian Interior is Gilman’s own Portrait of a Lady c.1905 (Aberdeen Art Gallery),6 a portrait of his first wife Grace (née Canedy).

The first owner of Edwardian Interior was the artist Hubert Wellington (1879–1967), a friend of Gilman’s from the time they were at the Slade together. He recalled in a letter to the Tate Gallery dated 6 October 1955:

Wellington’s reference to Edouard Vuillard is important, as there is a great deal of resonance between the two artists’ scenes of domestic life. However, the vibrant, post-impressionist palette of Vuillard and others did not find its way into Gilman’s work until a later phase in his development. In its subtle tones, and rich, subdued colouring, Edwardian Interior has more in common with seventeenth-century Dutch pictures of interiors. These enjoyed renewed appreciation and emulation in the early years of the twentieth century, and their influence was felt in the work of a section of younger painters that included Gilman’s Slade contemporaries William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy and Albert Rutherston. In Orpen’s ambiguous portrait study The Mirror 1900 (Tate N02940, fig.1), A Window in a London Street 1901 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)9 in which an isolated young woman (in fact Orpen’s fiancée Grace Knewstub) stares out of a drawing room window, or The Chess Players 1902 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford),10 narrative suggestion is suppressed in favour of a subtle mood study of figures in interiors. Such works are ambivalent in their status, neither genre pieces nor straightforward portraits of the artist’s friends and lovers who appear in them. The frequency with which the New English Art Club artists painted this sort of picture was highlighted by Martin Wood in the Studio in 1909, who also noted their ‘dramatic setting of a psychological moment’.11 The article drew particular attention to Orpen’s group portrait Homage to Manet c.1909 (Manchester City Art Gallery)12 and William Rothenstein’s In the Morning Room (‘A Family Group’) c.1909 (Manchester City Art Gallery).13 The subdued, domestic paintings that Gilman painted between 1905 and 1909 therefore fit into an established vein of exploration among artists of his generation. Partly this was based upon admiration of Dutch art of the past, but they may also have been inspired by the telling dramatic tension of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), whose plays enjoyed an avant-garde status in London in the early years of the century. Picture sitters are deployed in interiors like actors on a stage, and their silences are as revealing as any narrative.14

Gilman painted such works in a restrained, harmonious palette of browns, greys and blacks sparingly accented with green, pink or blue.15 Essentially it was a formula derived from James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and found in other painters’ work of this time, notably Orpen’s. But in Gilman’s case it was also an effect of his study and copying of Diego Velázquez in Madrid in 1901–2. There was also a certain similarity to Walter Sickert, although Gilman appeared largely unaware of his work until their meeting in 1907.

In his appreciation of Gilman in the catalogue of the 1919 memorial exhibition, Charles Ginner emphasised the qualities that characterise these early works:

Gilman’s friend Louis F. Fergusson also drew attention to both the surface and stillness of such works:

Fergusson also drew attention to the debt such works had to the Old Masters, particularly Velázquez and seventeenth-century Dutch painting: