Harold Gilman

The British artist Harold John Wilde Gilman (11 February 1876 – 12 February 1919) was a painter of interiors, portraits and landscapes, and a founder-member of the Camden Town Group.

Though born in Rode, Somerset, 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, at Abingdon School in Berkshire, 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 non-collegiate year at Oxford University (cut short by ill health) and after working in the 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 1904 he went to Spain and spent over a year studying Spanish masters (Velázquez and Goya as well as Whistler were major early influences).

At this time he met and married the American painter Grace Cornelia Canedy. 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 two daughters (one born 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.

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