Harold Gilman

Harold John Wilde Gilman (11 February 187612 February 1919) was a British painter of interiors, portraits and landscapes, and a founder-member of the Camden Town Group.

Early life and studies Harold John Wilde Gilman was the second son and one of the seven children of Emily Purcell Gulliver and John Gilman, curate of Rode, Somerset. Though born in Rode, Gilman spent his early years at Snargate Rectory, in the Romney Marshes in Kent, where his father was the Rector. He was educated in Kent, Abingdon School in Berkshire, from 1885 to 1890, in Rochester and at Tonbridge School, and for one year at Brasenose College in Oxford University.

Although he developed an interest in art during a childhood convalescence period, Gilman did not begin his artistic training until after his year at Oxford University (cut short by ill health) and after working in Ukraine as a tutor to a British family in Odessa (1895). In 1896 he entered the Hastings School of Art to study painting, but in 1897 transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he remained from 1897 to 1901, and where he met Spencer Gore. In 1902 he went to Spain and spent over a year studying Spanish masters. Velázquez and Goya as well as Whistler were major early influences.

Marriages At this time Gilman met the American painter Grace Cornelia Canedy; they had both been copying Velázquez in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. They married on 7 February 1903 in the garden of the United States consulate in Toledo, Spain. The couple settled in London (apart from a visit to her family in Chicago, when Gilman ducked pressure to join the Canedy family business). They had five children, of whom three survived, Elizabeth (born 19 January 1904, in London), Hannah (born 4 February 1905, in Chicago), and David Canedy (born 20 September 1908, at Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire). an artist he had met at Westminster and who had studied with him since 1914. She had their child in December 1917 and they married on 20 April 1918, on learning that Gilman's divorce had been finalised. After Gilman's death, in 1921 Sylvia married Leofric Gilman, his brother. Gilman had rejected Van Gogh's work when he first encountered it, but later became a strong admirer. According to Wyndham Lewis, he kept postcards of Van Gogh's work on his wall and sometimes hung one of his own works next to them, if he was especially satisfied with it.

He taught at the Westminster School of Art, where he influenced students such as Mary Godwin, Ruth Doggett, and Marjorie Sherlock. He then started his own school with Ginner.

In 1918 he was commissioned to travel to Nova Scotia by the Canadian War Records; and painted a picture of Halifax Harbour for the War Memorial at Ottawa.

He died in London on 12 February 1919, of the Spanish flu.

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. David Bowie purchased Gilman's A London Interior for his private art collection; the piece was sold at auction after Bowie died in 2016.