Estimated Price:
$Realized Price:
$
What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.
The Blue Dress; Sylvia Gilman oil on canvas 27 x 181/4 in. (68.5 x 46.3 cm.) Painted circa 1917 PROVENANCE Hon. M. Berry. Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd., London, where purchased by Lord Hartwell in July 1965. EXHIBITION London, Reid Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Harold Gilman, April 1964, no. 6, as The Blue Dress. NOTES We are very grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry. Harold Gilman moved to Letchworth in Hertfordshire in 1908 spending more time in London after 1909, later moving to the capital. Having studied at the Slade between 1897 and 1901 he became a founder member of the Fitzroy Street Group in 1907; the Camden Town Group in 1911; the London Group in 1913, as well as being the first president of the Cumberland Market Group in 1914. He had visited Spain in 1902 where he studied the Spanish masters, particularly Velasquez; Dieppe in 1907, where he stayed in Sickert's house at Neuville; Paris in 1911 with Charles Ginner; Sweden in 1912 and Norway in 1913. The present composition is dated to circa 1910 in the 1964 Reid Gallery exhibition catalogue; however, it is identical in handling with broadly slashed hatching and angular drawing to a painting of Sylvia Gilman seated, which is illustrated in the exhibition catalogue and dated to circa 1918. Gilman was married for the second time in the late summer of 1917 to Sylvia Hardy, an artist who had studied with him and who he had known since 1914. Richard Thomson comments on the artist's portraits, 'Gilman gave early evidence of his talent for revealing a personality. He rarely let slacken his ability to isolate and transcribe the mood of his model - he was particularly sensitive to women and preferred them as sitters - and from an early age showed his penchant and sympathy for withdrawn expressions of melancholy and vulnerablity... Gesture he preferred to keep to an undemonstrative minimum. Nevertheless, he recognised the character of hands and rarely left them out' (see R. Thomson, Harold Gilman, 1981, Arts Council exhibition catalogue, p. 20). Andrew Causey discusses the artist's interiors from the last years of his life, 'Gilman's painting was as much as ever about people and their activities, the way they occupy rooms and share spaces with inanimate objects, and in this respect his work is close to that of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters like Vermeer and de Hoogh. Vermeer's reputation was growing steadily at the time, and the two paintings by which he is now represented in the National Gallery were then both fairly recent acquistions. There is a sense of peace and solitude in Gilman's late interiors that contradicts the horror of the years in which they were painted, as the measured calmness of Vermeer's interiors was unswayed by the crises of seventeenth-century Holland' (see A. Causey, Harold Gilman, 1981, Arts Council exhibition catalogue, p. 18).
We're Hiring!
