The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Sylvia Gilman, the artist’s widow, from whom bought for £250 by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest and presented to Tate Gallery 1943.

The Artist’s Mother is painted in artists’ oil paint on primed stretched canvas. The support is one piece of plain, closely woven linen with a selvedge on the right-hand vertical length. The canvas does not appear to have been sized, allowing the primer to pass through the weave interstices to the back. The priming extends to the cut edges on three sides and stops just short of the selvedge. It comprises of a single opaque layer of white primer. The canvas is attached to a five-member stretcher with steel tacks. There is evidence along the bottom edge that the painting was re-stretched at some time. The canvas and its preparation are common to that found on all of Gilman’s paintings in the Tate collection (see also Tate T00096).

If there is any initial drawing, it and the early stages of painting are obscured by the density of later applications of paint. There are randomly positioned pin holes in all four corners but it is unclear as to what they relate. The painting has clearly been worked over a period of time. There is a remarkable accumulation of paint in some areas, such as around the sitter’s head and left-hand shoulder. In addition, the artist appears to have rubbed down areas of paint before continuing painting, for example, in the table on the right-hand side. By contrast, there are passages in which the paint film has been more freely worked and realised in a single campaign. The pattern of the wallpaper, for example, shows little correction and small areas of priming are left visible. Gilman seems to place deliberate emphasis on the manipulation of the paint with individual brushstrokes and drawn lines left clearly visible in the surface. His vigorous handling and less formulated approach seems to move away from earlier more restrictive working practices. At this time both Gilman and Spencer Gore had become interested in the emotional character of the subject, through their experience of post-impressionist painting. Gore said, ‘if the emotional significance which lies in things can be expressed in painting the way to it must lie through the outward character of the object painted’.1

While Gilman’s palette appears broadly consistent with that identified in other works of the period (see Tate N03684), he has also integrated medium-rich paints traditionally used for glazing; for example, natural madder lake has been used for the red of the flowers on the table, and in touches on the sitter’s lips and ears. The tonal contrast of the colours is reduced by an uneven coating of varnish, which has accumulated in the texture of the paint and has yellowed. Small fragments of crumbled priming and paint are embedded in the varnish. These were probably picked up when the varnish was brushed on after the paint had dried and hardened, suggesting that it was applied sometime after painting.

Gilman painted several pictures of his mother Emily, née Purcell Gulliver. These include The Old Lady 1911 (Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery),1 The Artist’s Mother at Lacon Hall c.1911 (Aberdeen Art Gallery), Interior with the Artist’s Mother 1917–18 (fig.1) and The Artist’s Mother Sleeping c.1918 (private collection),2 as well as a number of drawings (fig.2). The Tate picture shows Emily Gilman in the drawing room at Snargate Rectory. The dabbed touch and heightened palette are common to other portraits of Gilman’s mother from this period, notably The Old Lady.

In his introduction to the memorial exhibition of Gilman’s work held in 1919, Charles Ginner drew particular attention to Gilman’s pictures of his mother, and specifically to the Tate painting:

That Gilman should choose his mother as a subject is not surprising, as he invariably painted those around him, and notably those who played some part in his emotional life. But it is interesting to think of Gilman’s picture in relation to Whistler’s famous Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother 1871 (fig.3). Acquired by the French Government in 1891 – and delivered to Paris by Whistler’s pupil Walter Sickert – it is highly likely that Gilman was aware of this picture, and would have been able to see it in the Musée du Luxembourg on his visits to Paris. Such was the picture’s stature, and Gilman’s acknowledged early interest in Whistlerian harmony and smoothness, that it must be suspected that he was engaged in some form of mental comparison with this iconic image of Aestheticism. Gilman’s bright impressionist palette and crusty surface would have horrified Whistler, and it is as if Gilman is bidding goodbye to the subtle harmonies and glossy surfaces of his earlier pictures.

Further evidence that Gilman used such works to engage in a form of aesthetic didacticism comes from the art critic Frank Rutter, who recalled:

It is unknown which of the paintings of his mother Rutter was writing about, but the careful placing of colours next to each other in The Artist’s Mother must make it a possibility that it was the work shown as Thou shalt not put a Blue Line around Thy Mother.5

Gilman’s pictures of his mother might also be viewed as studies of age. This is an attribute also found in his paintings of Mrs Mounter (see Tate N05317), which similarly have the character of a woman who is old, but still resilient and independent.

The wicker armchair in which Mrs Gilman sits is the one in which she is depicted by her son in several of the other portraits, and a photograph exists of her sitting in it.6 The wallpaper in the background appears to be the same as in Edwardian Interior (Tate T00096), another Snargate picture painted some years before, and establishing the location as the Rectory’s drawing room. Gilman frequently favoured placing his sitters against such decorative wallpaper backgrounds, which were often brightly coloured and with geometric patterns. The wallpaper in the sitting room at 47 Maple Street W1, glimpsed as a patterned strip at the centre of Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table (Tate N05317), appears to have been a particular favourite, and one which featured in several portraits. At the small art school he opened with Ginner in January 1916 at 15–16 Little Pulteney Street in Soho, Gilman would reputedly seat models in front of a screen covered with a boldly patterned wallpaper.7