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Artist or Maker: Harold Gilman (1876-1919)
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Provenance: with Leicester Galleries, London.
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Notes: The present composition demonstrates Gilman's skill and ingenuity as a portraitist and dates from after his visit to the 1910 Post Impressionist exhibition, which had been organised by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries, London. Gilman's pictures from 1911 to 1915 are painted in a mosaic style. The objectives of this style were to provide a solid and durable work of art of great realism; sometimes Gilman was to pursue these objectives with an uncompromising tenacity which seems to our eyes almost too brutal. In his own eyes, however, this mosaic style, with its close juxtaposition of spots of often violent colour, was not entirely satisfactory in the sense that the small broken brush-strokes, which emphasised the solid craftsmanship of the painter had a tendency to obscure the solidarity of his subjects by merging their outlines into a general surface pattern, (see J. Agnew, Exhibition catalogue, Harold Gilman, Colchester, 1969, p. 2).
The idea of uniting the sitter within an interior with the device of the fireplace behind was a theme of the Camden painters, inspired by Walter Richard Sickert. Other design details which Gilman employed in his interior compositions included overmantel mirrors and still life details. Sir Claude Phillips, writing in the Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1911, described Gilman as, 'a neo-impressionist with a personal accent of his own, that suffices to make the obvious and the everyday interesting'.
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