The Camden Town Group in Context

Judge William Evans (1861–1944) by 1911; Hugh Blaker (1873–1936) by 1928; bought at Leicester Galleries, London, by Tate Gallery 1948.

Lady on a Sofa is painted in artists’ oil paints on a primed, stretched canvas. The cloth is fine plain weave linen with some rough and uneven threads whose texture is visible at the surface. The cloth is probably sized but this is not detectable and one layer of white primer has been evenly applied. The priming extends to the cut edges on all but one side. Primer has penetrated through to the back of the canvas in places, indicating that if present the sizing is very thin and does not form a continuous layer. The stretched support is similar to all of the works by Gilman that have been examined (see also Tate T00096).

There is no visible evidence of initial drawing. The main composition was established in broadly brushed dark blues and greys, which are visible at the edges of forms. The painting appears to have been carried out over a period of time. Thick paint has been worked across the surface using small-headed brushes, building up a lively texture through variation in application. Gilman has worked both wet-in-wet, mixing colours on the surface, and wet-on-dry allowing touch-dry colour to remain undisturbed by the application of more paint. He has reworked and modified some areas several times, for example, the rug and the valance and arms of the sofa. The effect is of a moving play of light and dark across the surface with final impasto accents of bright colour drawing the painting together.

There is a clear transition in technique in this painting moving from his early fluency to the rigorous patterning of his later works. In 1910 Gilman described a new modern technique of painting; the ideas outlined are explored through his own practice in Lady on a Sofa:

The sitter for Lady on a Sofa was Gilman’s sister Irene Beatrice Gilman (1877–1944). Her daughter Betty Powell (born 1916) recalls that Irene told her the circumstances of the picture being made.1 Irene sat frequently for her brother, often in tiring poses, of which an example must be Tate’s Edwardian Interior (Tate T00096). This time she insisted on a more relaxed position, although lying for long periods on the sofa apparently turned out to be almost as tiring. The oblique angle of the book would make it impossible to read, and either Irene has tired of it or has actually fallen asleep. Gilman was renowned for the slow and careful pace at which he worked. Powell remembers the sofa being part of their household furniture. It was of the type that had two folding arms and, unlike in the picture, her mother would usually lie on it with either one or both arms folded down. The picture was painted in Preston, probably at their parents’ first house after their marriage.

Gilman painted scenes of the domestic life that surrounded him throughout his short painting career. Even the pictures of his landlady Mrs Mounter (Tate N05317), painted in his rooms at Maple Street after his separation from his first wife Grace, might be seen in this way. In one sense the artist was following the naturalist creed of painting what was about him, and it is tempting to regard pictures such as Lady on a Sofa as glimpses of everyday life. But there is nevertheless a staged quality to these works. In part, Gilman was responding to a resurgence of interest in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of contemplative figures in interiors, a taste also to be found amongst contemporaries such as William Orpen, William Rothenstein, Ambrose McEvoy and Philip Wilson Steer (fig.1) (see Tate T00096 and T13024).2 The reading girl was also a staple subject of Victorian art from the 1860s onwards, and a nuance of the popular ‘dolce far niente’ pictures of women lost in reverie, listlessness or languor. But reading also signified access to the freedoms of learning, entertainment and the imagination. A private activity, located in the domestic sphere, reading was often characterised as a specifically solitary and female pursuit.

The picture’s first owner was Judge William Evans, a keen collector of Camden Town Group paintings (see Tate N05099). Gilman painted another picture of Irene on the same sofa, Lady on a Sofa (private collection),3 which once belonged to Edward Le Bas. This shows only the top half of Irene’s body. It is likely that one of these was exhibited by Gilman at the first Camden Town Group exhibition in 1911, but it is not possible to ascertain which with certainty.