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Lot Essay
Gilman's monumental Portrait of a Negro Gardiner seems to have been the first British painting of the twentieth century to portray a sub-saharan African as a stand-alone figure. Some seven to eight years later, around 1912-13, Glyn Philpot, Malcolm Drummond and Walter Sickert were all to draw and paint black Africans. Indeed, they probably all used the same model. It is interesting that Sickert presented the model as a singer (Negro Spirituals), a rôle that to an extent foreshadowed the specific view of black culture adopted by Edward Burra and Philpot. As the jazz age gained momentum during the first half of the last century, low-life scenes in the streets, bars and dance-halls of Haarlem and Marseilles by Burra, or the more sophisticated milieux painted by Philpot, became an independent sub-genre of figure painting in Britain.
In British painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black figures had usually been treated as exotic decorative accessories - extras in continental crowd scenes or slaves within fashionable portraits. There were exceptions, notably portraits of significant contemporary figures such as William Hoare's portrait of the freed slave, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of 1733 and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai, the young Tahitian brought to Britain in 1774. During the heyday of Empire, Indian princes and maharajahs were often painted on a grand scale. Sickert's Portrait of an Afghan Gentleman, circa 1895 was clearly a portrait of a dignitary, although which dignitary remains unknown. However, whilst Moors, Arabs, Tahitians and Indians were proper subjects for painting, apart from Head of a Negro, a rare oil by Joseph Crawhall (probably painted in Morocco during the later 1880s or 1890s), sub-saharan Africans were seldom portrayed in their own right. Gilman's life-size, full-length gardener is thus a rare exception. The painting is neither an ethnographical study nor a portrait. Almost certainly a model, portrayed with props, he is of imposing physique and self-sufficient dignity. Which poses the question as to where it might have been painted.
Gilman's long training as an artist (Hastings School of Art 1896; Slade School of Fine Art in London 1897-1901) culminated in a visit to Spain from 1901 until 1903. In Madrid's Prado Museum, besides copying paintings by Velázquez and Goya, he met Grace Canedy, daughter of a wealthy Chicago industrialist, who was also on a pilgrimage to copy Velázquez. They married in 1902 and returned to England in 1903. It is unclear how many trips the Gilmans made together to the United States before 1909 when Grace went alone to Chicago with their three surviving children, never to return to England and her husband again. However, we know they left England in 1904 and were together when their second child was born in Chicago at the beginning of 1905. It is thus possible that Gilman found his model in the United States. It is not easy to date the painting, largely because so few paintings survive which were done before 1907, when Gilman joined the Fitzroy Street Group and the London art world. A date around 1905 is feasible. The ambitious design and format, the sharp definition, the crisp tonality, suggest an artist whose formative period included recent study of Velázquez and Manet. The scale of the painting could be a reflection of the experience Gilman gained in 1904 when he is reputed to have been commissioned to execute murals in a Canadian government building in Ottawa. No information about the theme and location of these murals has survived so this is no more than a hypothesis.
So far as is known, the painting was not exhibited during Gilman's lifetime. It was a one-off, altogether different in style and content from the freely-handled half-length Study of a Negro he painted a few years later. It remained in the possession of Gilman's immediate family until the 1970s. It is a work of striking originality and presence.
We are very grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for preparing the catalogue entries for lots 8, 30, 31 and 33.
In British painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black figures had usually been treated as exotic decorative accessories - extras in continental crowd scenes or slaves within fashionable portraits. There were exceptions, notably portraits of significant contemporary figures such as William Hoare's portrait of the freed slave, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of 1733 and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai, the young Tahitian brought to Britain in 1774. During the heyday of Empire, Indian princes and maharajahs were often painted on a grand scale. Sickert's Portrait of an Afghan Gentleman, circa 1895 was clearly a portrait of a dignitary, although which dignitary remains unknown. However, whilst Moors, Arabs, Tahitians and Indians were proper subjects for painting, apart from Head of a Negro, a rare oil by Joseph Crawhall (probably painted in Morocco during the later 1880s or 1890s), sub-saharan Africans were seldom portrayed in their own right. Gilman's life-size, full-length gardener is thus a rare exception. The painting is neither an ethnographical study nor a portrait. Almost certainly a model, portrayed with props, he is of imposing physique and self-sufficient dignity. Which poses the question as to where it might have been painted.
Gilman's long training as an artist (Hastings School of Art 1896; Slade School of Fine Art in London 1897-1901) culminated in a visit to Spain from 1901 until 1903. In Madrid's Prado Museum, besides copying paintings by Velázquez and Goya, he met Grace Canedy, daughter of a wealthy Chicago industrialist, who was also on a pilgrimage to copy Velázquez. They married in 1902 and returned to England in 1903. It is unclear how many trips the Gilmans made together to the United States before 1909 when Grace went alone to Chicago with their three surviving children, never to return to England and her husband again. However, we know they left England in 1904 and were together when their second child was born in Chicago at the beginning of 1905. It is thus possible that Gilman found his model in the United States. It is not easy to date the painting, largely because so few paintings survive which were done before 1907, when Gilman joined the Fitzroy Street Group and the London art world. A date around 1905 is feasible. The ambitious design and format, the sharp definition, the crisp tonality, suggest an artist whose formative period included recent study of Velázquez and Manet. The scale of the painting could be a reflection of the experience Gilman gained in 1904 when he is reputed to have been commissioned to execute murals in a Canadian government building in Ottawa. No information about the theme and location of these murals has survived so this is no more than a hypothesis.
So far as is known, the painting was not exhibited during Gilman's lifetime. It was a one-off, altogether different in style and content from the freely-handled half-length Study of a Negro he painted a few years later. It remained in the possession of Gilman's immediate family until the 1970s. It is a work of striking originality and presence.
We are very grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for preparing the catalogue entries for lots 8, 30, 31 and 33.