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Artist or Maker: Gilman, Harold (1876-1919)
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Provenance: The artist's family.
with Lefevre Gallery, London.
Morton Oliphant, Liverpool; his sale, Sotheby's, London, 26 November 1969, lot 331, as 'A White Cup and Saucer and Jug on a Table', where purchased by Agnew's on behalf of the present owner.
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Exhibited: London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Harold Gilman, July 1948, no. 32.
London, Arts Council, Harold Gilman, 1954-55, no. 34, as 'Still Life'.
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Notes: Each generation produces a few painters who lift the humble genre of still life into a new dimension. In England, the first quarter of the 20th Century gave us William Nicholson and Harold Gilman. The first picture Gilman is known to have had accepted for public exhibition was Still Life at the New English Art Club in spring 1904. This painting has not been identified, but we may presume it reflected the influence of the masters whose paintings Gilman had copied in the Prado during his prolonged stay in Spain from 1901-03. While Gilman painted few pure still lifes over the next ten years, several of his domestic interiors dwell lovingly on still life incidents: vases of flowers, plants in pots, a wicker sewing basket, a cluttered table. However, Gilman's quintessential still life subjects belong to the last four years of his life.
In 1914 Gilman rented rooms at 47 Maple Street, his permanent address in London. In the same eventful year he was elected President of the newly created London Group and his artistic alliance with Charles Ginner, as 'Neo-Realists', was consolidated. Ginner explained in an essay published in January 1914 that Neo-Realism involved the artist seizing upon an aspect of nature which particularly appealed to him, studying it with the utmost rigour and then objectively transposing it into canvas through the use of 'sound and solid' pigment. Gilman, in an interview published in February, chose to demonstrate this doctrine through the example of a potted cactus: in Neo-Realist hands this still life subject would not be reduced only to geometric shapes, planes and curves but would remain a cactus.
Gilman's rooms in Maple Street are among the most instantly recognisable interiors in the history of art. The brightly patterned wallpaper, the simple furniture, the pictures on the walls, from 1916 Mrs Mounter - his landlady, his kitchen crockery, all afforded him precisely the raw materials he needed. In the portraits he first painted in these rooms he used a tea cup as an incident to soften the formality of the image. The tea-cup was soon joined by other pieces from the kitchen cupboard until, in Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table (fig. 1, Tate, London) the objects on the table almost usurp Mrs Mounter as the primary subject. It is not too fanciful to read the painting as devotional, a reading reinforced by the pyramidal structure familiar to us through countless representations of the Madonna and Child.
The painting on offer here asserts the ascendancy of still life with unique clarity. It is entirely self-contained. There is no attendant figure and no identifiable setting. The arrangement shuns all pretence of naturalistic effect. Apart from the tiny segment of a plate at the right edge obscured by a covered dish, the objects do not overlap (it may be relevant that Gilman chose to set that plate apart from his main group not only by edging it out of the picture, but also by giving it a blue rim in contrast to green used in the other pieces). Each pair of objects, a jug on a mat, a cup on a saucer, and a covered dish, is deliberately placed in isolation; each is perfect in itself. In human terms, they combine as a solemn conversation piece; in abstract terms they create a melodic counterpoint of elliptical green-tinged shapes. In this Still Life, Gilman has reconciled the credo of Neo-Realism with the formal innovations of Post-Impressionism. While the jug remains a jug, the cup a cup and so on, other conversations of realism have been spurned. The relative proportions of the objects are doubtful; the table has been tipped up toward the surface plane; the space beyond the table defies analysis. The table itself has been painted in a patchwork of striated patterns, all low-toned and vaguely woody, but closer study shows each patch, variously coloured in lilac-grey, brown, grey and black, probably represents neither wood nor fabric. The patchwork seems to be an aesthetic device, just as the coloured shapes in the background are dictated by the needs of the pattern on the surface rather than an effort to suggest a three-dimensional setting. Even the placing and style of signature supports the aesthetic unity of this consummate painting.
We are very grateful to Dr. Wendy Baron for preparing this catalogue entry.
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