The Garden Museum has announced the acquisition of Harold Gilman’s ‘Portrait of a Black Gardener’. This enigmatic painting will make a significant contribution to the Museum’s collection and we are very grateful for the generous support of £60,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Further support from the Art Fund, and the Royal Horticultural Society – with whom we will share access to this work, made the acquisition possible. The portrait will go on display here at the museum in spring 2013 after the completion of conservation work.
‘Portrait of a Black Gardner’ by Harold Gilman (1876 – 1919), dated by Wendy Baron to 1905. Garden Museum
‘Portrait of a Black Gardener’, dated to 1905 by Wendy Baron, is unique as an heroic image of gardening; Gilman, Sickert’s friend and rival, was a radical figure in British art before the first world war and this pictures demonstrates his skill with the brush – but also with the spade; he was a pioneer of Letchworth Garden City. It is also a key painting in the story of how black people have been presented in British art; it is one of the first portraits in which a non-white person is painted alone and as a proud full-length. The picture is an enigma – we would love to know who the model might have been – but its display in a public collection means we can begin to unravel its mysteries.
Harold Gilman, born 11 February 1876, was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, along with Walter Sickert. Trained at the Slade with Spencer Gore and Wyndham Lewis, Gilman was an important figure in this short lived but influential movement in the early 20th century. His work features prominently in several national collections, and his portrait by Sickert held by Tate, gives us insight into his determined nature. Gilman’s ‘Portrait of a Black Gardener’ is one of very few portraits to illustrate his formative period between a year’s study in The Prado, and we can see both the shadow of Velasquez in this work and Gilman’s his transformation under Sickert’s influence. Portraits of gardeners are rarer still, and his choice of topic may reflect Gilman’s own interest in the subject as a pioneer of Letchworth Garden City.
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