Mother and Child

Throughout his career, Harold Gilman depicted his family and friends. This touching portrayal records his second wife Sylvia (who he had married the previous year) breastfeeding their young son John. She is completely absorbed, as if unaware of her husband’s tender gaze. Gilman renders the immensely personal moment using vivid tones and a rich mosaic of colour, balancing his concern for the abstract with the human intimacy of the scene.

Gilman was strongly influenced by the work of Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, which he saw at the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in 1912, but the flat ochre background and broad stripes of her skirt are also reminiscent of the flat planes found in Japanese ukiyo-e prints. These had become very influential on a number of artists from the mid-19th century onwards in Paris, where they had first arrived as mere wrapping paper around pieces of porcelain.

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