Harold Gilman

This has traditionally had the title French Interior since Harold Gilman’s memorial exhibition in 1919. The bed is of a typically French type, as is the high mattress and the chair in the foreground.1 The style indicates it is an early work, and therefore its title might suggest that it was made during or after Gilman’s visit to stay in Walter Sickert’s house in Neuville near Dieppe in 1907 (see also fig.1). The picture’s smooth, sleek surface, thin, liquid application of paint, and beautiful, subdued palette of pinks and greys demonstrate the influence Velázquez still had on Gilman at this date. Gilman spent more than a year in Madrid in 1901–2, studying the Spanish masters in the Prado and making copies after Velázquez.2 Interest in the Spanish Old Master among British artists around the turn of the century was stimulated by the appearance in 1899 of R.A.M. Stevenson’s influential monograph.3

Around the time he made French Interior, Gilman painted a number of pictures of interiors, usually of houses in which he lived. Here the composition is tightly constrained, the picture space pushing all the elements together to create a mixture of intimacy and claustrophobia. It is possible that Gilman was using some sort of proportional composition formula. The woman remains unidentified. She is not Gilman’s wife Grace, nor apparently their maid Susan who appears in pictures such as Interior 1908 (private collection);4 neither does she appear to be Sickert’s housekeeper in France.

However decorously dressed and modest, the picture was likely to have raised questions for an Edwardian audience about the probity of showing a woman in her – or the artist’s – bedroom. The sitter’s tidy posture, hands folded in her lap, suggests self-containment, and her direct gaze is confident. But there is also a feeling of marked ambiguity about the scene. Fitting into Gilman’s programme of painting scenes of figures in interiors (see Tate T00096 and T13024), it raises questions about why the woman is sitting in the bedroom – is she waiting for someone, or simply observing the painter observing her? Why is she doing nothing? Seated against the door, she blocks any exit from the bedroom. What is the purpose – or intention – of a scene that, while a piece of ‘naturalist’ observation, is evidently completely staged? The dominance of the room’s furniture, and the figure’s marginality within the composition, suppress any sense that the picture is a portrait, while the cropping of the foreground makes us feel as if we are in the room with her, in a kind of enforced intimacy.