Harold Gilman

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Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table, 1917

The British artist Harold John Wilde Gilman (Rode, Somerset, 11 February 1876 - London, 12 February 1919) was a founder-member of the Camden Town Group. He died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19.

[edit] Life and work

Developing an interest in art during a childhood convalescence period, he began his artistic training after a non-collegiate year at Oxford University (again cut short by ill health) and time working as a tutor to an English family living in Odessa. Studying at the Hastings School of Art (1896) and then the Slade School of Fine Art (1897–1901), he then spent over a year studying the Spanish masters (Velázquez as well as Whistler were major early influences) and meeting and marrying the American painter Grace Cornelia Canedy. Moving back to London, where they settled (apart from an abortive trip to visit her family in Chicago, in which Gilman ducked pressure to join the Canedy family business), they had two daughters (one in London, one in Chicago).

Meeting Walter Sickert in 1907, Gilman became a founder member of both the Fitzroy Street Group (in 1907) and the Camden Town Group (in 1911). In the meantime he joined the Allied Artists' Association, moved to Letchworth, and began to show influence from work of Vuillard as well as Sickert. He soon outpaced Sickert's understanding of post-Impressionism and moved out from under his shadow, however, using ever stronger colour and identifying with Charles Ginner as a 'Neo-Realist' (exhibiting with Ginner under that label in 1914).

Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord, c. 1913

Gilman visited Scandinavia in 1912 and 1913, and may have travelled with the artist William Ratcliffe, who had relations there. Gilman made studies of the environment, and painted Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord, an accurate depiction, whose subject is likely to have been inspired by Vincent van Gogh's depiction of a similar bridge in Provence.^[1] Gilman had rejected Van Gogh's work when he first encountered it, but later became a strong admirer and, according to Wyndham Lewis, keeping postcards of Van Gogh's work on his wall and sometimes hanging one of his own works next to them, if he was especially satisfied with it.^[1]

At that time he also joined Robert Bevan's short-lived Cumberland Market Group with Ginner and John Nash. Remarrying in 1917, in 1918 he was commissioned to travel to Nova Scotia by the Canadian War Records.

[edit] Legacy

Exhibitions were devoted to him at the Tate in 1954 and 1981, and he also featured in its 2007–2008 Camden Town Group retrospective at Tate Britain.

[edit] Gallery

The Thames at Chelsea, 1899–1901	Clarissa, c. 1911	Sylvia Gosse, c. 1913	An Eating House, 1913/14
A Portrait in Profile: Mary L. Harold Gilman, 1914	Girl with a Tea Cup, c. 1914	Miss Ruth Doggett, c. 1915	Mother and Child, 1918