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Lot Essay
Throughout his life, Gilman found most of his subjects within his own domestic environment. Portraits and figure studies, still life paintings, even some outdoor subjects such as washing on a line in the garden, reflected his immediate surroundings. This tender painting shows his first wife concentrating on her sewing. She is sitting at a table in Snargate Rectory, home to Gilman's parents since 1890 when his father secured the livings of Snargate with Snave, in Romney Marsh.
On leaving the Slade in 1901, Gilman had continued his education as a painter with a visit to Spain where he copied paintings by Velazquez and Goya in Madrid's Prado Museum and met Grace Canedy, daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Chicago, who was also on a pilgrimage to copy Velazquez. They married in Toledo, Spain, in February 1902. Grace, twelve years older than her husband, was forty when their first child was born in 1904; she bore three more children over the next five years. They had little money and, after a visit to the United States and Canada, they went to live at Snargate, remaining there until 1908 when they moved to the new garden city of Letchworth. In 1909 Grace, debilitated by childbirth and anaemia, went with their three surviving children to recover at her parental home in Chicago. She and the children never returned to England.
Grace in a Snargate setting is the subject of several early paintings by Gilman (for example Edwardian Interior [Tate, London]). With its floral wallpaper, mahogany furniture and clutter of decorative objects, Snargate Rectory prepared Gilman to tackle the interiors he painted in Maple Street, Fitzrovia, from 1914 onwards; his ability to integrate furnishings, still life features, insistent wallpaper patterns and a figure had been honed at Snargate.
Woman Sewing was probably painted circa 1908, towards the end of the Gilman family's residence at Snargate Rectory. Treatment and subject are in perfect harmony. Grace is utterly absorbed, seemingly unaware that she is being painted. The colours are muted but varied, with effective contrasts of sharp apple green, pinks, lilacs and cream, enlivened by scattered marks of vivid blue. The use of distinct, broken brushmarks and brighter colour suggest that Gilman's introduction to Sickert, Gore and their circle at 19 Fitzroy Street in 1907, was beginning to influence his handling. Hitherto, Velazquez and Whistler, with their fluent surfaces and silvery tonalities, had been his most powerful inspirations. Gilman's impressive mastery of formal compositional structure is beautifully demonstrated in the taut design of this painting. The foreshortened view of the straw basket, the angled placement of the scissors and the diagonal alignment of the table, form the base of a three-dimensional pyramid which culminates in Grace's head. The intimacy of the subject was one that Gilman reserved for the women closest to him: Grace; his mother (The Artist's Mother at Lecon Hall, Aberdeen Art Gallery); and Sylvia, his second wife, darning (private collection).
There is a drawing of Grace sewing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. While not a direct study for this painting (it lacks a setting, and the chair on which Grace is seated is not the Windsor Chair seen in the painting), drawing and painting share a distinctive mood and theme.
W.B.
On leaving the Slade in 1901, Gilman had continued his education as a painter with a visit to Spain where he copied paintings by Velazquez and Goya in Madrid's Prado Museum and met Grace Canedy, daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Chicago, who was also on a pilgrimage to copy Velazquez. They married in Toledo, Spain, in February 1902. Grace, twelve years older than her husband, was forty when their first child was born in 1904; she bore three more children over the next five years. They had little money and, after a visit to the United States and Canada, they went to live at Snargate, remaining there until 1908 when they moved to the new garden city of Letchworth. In 1909 Grace, debilitated by childbirth and anaemia, went with their three surviving children to recover at her parental home in Chicago. She and the children never returned to England.
Grace in a Snargate setting is the subject of several early paintings by Gilman (for example Edwardian Interior [Tate, London]). With its floral wallpaper, mahogany furniture and clutter of decorative objects, Snargate Rectory prepared Gilman to tackle the interiors he painted in Maple Street, Fitzrovia, from 1914 onwards; his ability to integrate furnishings, still life features, insistent wallpaper patterns and a figure had been honed at Snargate.
Woman Sewing was probably painted circa 1908, towards the end of the Gilman family's residence at Snargate Rectory. Treatment and subject are in perfect harmony. Grace is utterly absorbed, seemingly unaware that she is being painted. The colours are muted but varied, with effective contrasts of sharp apple green, pinks, lilacs and cream, enlivened by scattered marks of vivid blue. The use of distinct, broken brushmarks and brighter colour suggest that Gilman's introduction to Sickert, Gore and their circle at 19 Fitzroy Street in 1907, was beginning to influence his handling. Hitherto, Velazquez and Whistler, with their fluent surfaces and silvery tonalities, had been his most powerful inspirations. Gilman's impressive mastery of formal compositional structure is beautifully demonstrated in the taut design of this painting. The foreshortened view of the straw basket, the angled placement of the scissors and the diagonal alignment of the table, form the base of a three-dimensional pyramid which culminates in Grace's head. The intimacy of the subject was one that Gilman reserved for the women closest to him: Grace; his mother (The Artist's Mother at Lecon Hall, Aberdeen Art Gallery); and Sylvia, his second wife, darning (private collection).
There is a drawing of Grace sewing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. While not a direct study for this painting (it lacks a setting, and the chair on which Grace is seated is not the Windsor Chair seen in the painting), drawing and painting share a distinctive mood and theme.
W.B.