The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased from Mrs Sylvia Gilman, the artist’s widow, by Alex, Reid and Lefevre, London, 1944, by whom sold to Mrs E.M. Macdonald (wife of Duncan Macdonald, Director of Alex, Reid and Lefevre) the same year, from whom bought by Tate Gallery 1947.

French Interior is painted on commercially primed canvas in artists’ oil paint. A historic paper label on the back bears an ink inscription in Gilman’s hand. The label is damaged but parts of it are still legible and read: ‘No 2 Interior, H Gilman, [...]gate Road, England’.

The prepared canvas conforms to the basic type found on all of Gilman’s paintings in the Tate collection (see also Tate T00096). It is fine plain weave linen and retains its selvedge. The canvas is sized and has a single white priming. The priming extends to the cut edges of the canvas and retains the fine weave texture. It has penetrated through to the back of the canvas in places, indicating that the sizing may be very thin and discontinuous. There are double pin holes with the remnants of steel prongs at each corner applied through the painted canvas. These may have been made by pins used to locate the canvas for re-stretching. The work was put onto its existing stretcher some time after painting, possibly when the picture was varnished, and the studio stamp subsequently applied.

There are evenly spaced pin holes along all four edges of the painted surface that may relate to a threaded grid for the transfer of a drawn image, although there is no visible evidence of any graphic underdrawing. The initial composition was established with freely drawn and washed areas of colours in thinned paint. After the painting had been laid in with a limited range of pinks, greys and browns, it was allowed to become touch-dry before applying the main colouring. This tonal underpainting remains visible in many areas around the borders of forms. The final colouring and details were applied with fluent strokes of medium-rich paint that flowed easily across the fine texture retaining some softened brushmarking. There is little sign of hesitation or revision apart from some areas of particular focus, such as the figure. Fresh, wet-in-wet touches evoke the play of light on different surfaces, such as the translucent net curtains and satin-like shimmer of the bed clothes. The drawing is occasionally reinstated during the final painting as in the fall of the bed drapes.

This has traditionally had the title French Interior since Harold Gilman’s memorial exhibition in 1919. The bed is of a typically French type, as is the high mattress and the chair in the foreground.1 The style indicates it is an early work, and therefore its title might suggest that it was made during or after Gilman’s visit to stay in Walter Sickert’s house in Neuville near Dieppe in 1907 (see also fig.1). The picture’s smooth, sleek surface, thin, liquid application of paint, and beautiful, subdued palette of pinks and greys demonstrate the influence Velázquez still had on Gilman at this date. Gilman spent more than a year in Madrid in 1901–2, studying the Spanish masters in the Prado and making copies after Velázquez.2 Interest in the Spanish Old Master among British artists around the turn of the century was stimulated by the appearance in 1899 of R.A.M. Stevenson’s influential monograph.3

Around the time he made French Interior, Gilman painted a number of pictures of interiors, usually of houses in which he lived. Here the composition is tightly constrained, the picture space pushing all the elements together to create a mixture of intimacy and claustrophobia. It is possible that Gilman was using some sort of proportional composition formula. The woman remains unidentified. She is not Gilman’s wife Grace, nor apparently their maid Susan who appears in pictures such as Interior 1908 (private collection);4 neither does she appear to be Sickert’s housekeeper in France.

However decorously dressed and modest, the picture was likely to have raised questions for an Edwardian audience about the probity of showing a woman in her – or the artist’s – bedroom. The sitter’s tidy posture, hands folded in her lap, suggests self-containment, and her direct gaze is confident. But there is also a feeling of marked ambiguity about the scene. Fitting into Gilman’s programme of painting scenes of figures in interiors (see Tate T00096 and T13024), it raises questions about why the woman is sitting in the bedroom – is she waiting for someone, or simply observing the painter observing her? Why is she doing nothing? Seated against the door, she blocks any exit from the bedroom. What is the purpose – or intention – of a scene that, while a piece of ‘naturalist’ observation, is evidently completely staged? The dominance of the room’s furniture, and the figure’s marginality within the composition, suppress any sense that the picture is a portrait, while the cropping of the foreground makes us feel as if we are in the room with her, in a kind of enforced intimacy.

There is a certain similarity to a painting by William Orpen, The Bedroom (‘The Bed, Cany’) 1900 (private collection),5 which shows Orpen’s fiancée Emily Scobel seated beside a canopied bed. It was only exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1901, and so Gilman is perhaps unlikely to have seen it, but it is another example of the type of subjectless interior scene that was popularised in the first decade of the twentieth century. Gilman returned to the theme again in his painting Interior of 1917–18 (British Council),6 which shows his second wife Sylvia sitting on the corner of a bed with her back facing the viewer.