The Black Gardener
Recently, the Garden Museum, located in the old church next
to Lambeth Palace, has acquired a very striking painting by Harold Gilman,
depicting a tall man wearing work clothes of
white shirt and dark grey trousers, standing with a garden spade and
some garden pots. It dates from 1905 and
looks as if it meant to represent a gardener, even though the figure is shown
barefoot and in a blank, apparently interior space.
It’s a fine picture. The confident, relaxed drawing conveys
a relaxed, self-possessed individual and the restricted palette of whites,
browns and grey/blacks is both strong and quite beautiful.
With his weight on one leg and the other knee bent, he stands in a classic /neo-classical pose derived from antique sculpture, and with the spade to help the pose he resembles numerous art school studies -of the draped male figure. So there are suggestions that the individual portrayed was a model rather than a gardener, that the terracotta pots are decorative accessories, and that the picture was painted in the studio, far from any presumed garden. A real gardener, it is argued, would wear boots - not least because it's otherwise impossible to dig with a spade.
Certainly the shadows - that cast on the wall behind the figure and the mysterious one to the left - indicate that this is an interior space. But my eye was drawn to the date of 1905 and the fact that around this time, Gilman was visiting his wife's family in Chicago. His in-laws were wealthy machine-tool manufacturers, whom Gilman is said to have found uncongenial. I wonder if, obliged to make a relatively extended visit, he sought to carry on with his art and looked around for potential subjects? His in-laws are likely to have employed African-American staff as maids, cooks, gardeners, and it seems plausible that Gilman asked this man to pose for him, perhaps attracted by the colour-scheme afforded by brown skin, white shirt and dark trousers as well as his dignified demeanour.
The sitter took off his boots because - in this scenario - the designated studio space was indoors, but the artist imported his spade and pots as attributes - precisely to show his model's true occupation. so possibly he was a gardener - but not a Briton, as has been assumed. It would be nice to know.
While preparing a course on women artists, I’ve
recently discovered that Edmonia Lewis, the Black American sculptor of mixed
African and Ojibwe descent, spent her last years in London. No one seems to know why she came to
Britain or whom she knew here. Born in
New York in 1844, she had a difficult youth until enrolled at Oberlin College
Ohio during the US Civil War. She studied
art and was funded to travel to Rome, where she flourished as a sculptor,
mainly with dramatic marble figures. Some,
like Forever Free and Hagar
reference her African-American heritage, others like Indian Combat and Minehaha
reference her Native American roots (Longfellow’s Hiawatha being based on Ojibwe tales) Some were portrait busts, the Death of Cleopatra a full-length reclining figure, which went to the centennial
exhibition in Philadelphia and was then lost and damaged before being rescued. Her last recorded work was an Adoration of the Magi (1883). It’s not
yet known when she relocated to London but in 1901 the Census shows her residence as 37 Store Street, Bloomsbury (age 59; birthplace 'India'!; occupation 'artist / modeller', so she was still working in clay) and at the time of
her death in 1907 she was living in Blythe Road west London. She was buried in St
Mary’s the Catholic part of Kensal Rise cemetery. Does anyone know any more about her time in
Britain?
It’s bad enough when
dramatisations cast actors in fictional roles who look completely different
from one’s mental conception of the character, but ‘true story’ dramas can have the complication
of real life likenesses working against audiences’ visual knowledge – a fact especially
true of the main players in the popular Pre-Raphaelite sitcom, which sometimes
seems endlessly rehearsed. So heartfelt
compliments to the casting director and cast of the new play at the Arcola
Theatre, for their vivification of the chief characters, who vividly resemble the
originals and convincingly portray them.
Although Rossetti is rather taller than in life, and Annie Miller too
petite, Holman Hunt, John Ruskin (with a smug, half-fixed smile) and jaunty,
confident John Millais are acutely rendered and all convey a highly plausible
animation, while Emma West the actor playing Lizzie Siddal, with the pearlescent skin
that often goes with copper hair, could
be her double.
The playwright Jeremy Green has
taken on board recent scholarship on Siddal’s artistic aspirations to give her
an active role in the PRB circle. He resisted
the temptation that often makes Rossetti’s charismatic personality dominate the
drama, and remarkably has drawn Gabriel as the sexually reluctant partner in
the relationship (as I have always thought) albeit without quite explaining
this. The first half of the evening is high-spirited
and upbeat, successfully conveying the PRBs’ youthful optimism – I particularly
liked how each young man declared himself a genius – and deftly navigates the
shoals of period misrepresentation. I should
confess to an offstage ‘appearance’ as a Mrs Marsh, whose grizzling twins have
required nearly all the shopkeeper’s supply of laudanum, but an irritating anachronism
to show it being glugged directly from the bottle. 
Not in the display, but in the UCL Art Collection, are some of the remarkable portrait sketches drawn by Prof. Henry Tonks, widely credited with giving Slade students like MacKusick their rigorous training in observational depiction. During WWI, Tonks worked with pioneer plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, in efforts to record and repair facial injuries, Tonks bringing all his draughtsman skill to render what we'd call disfigurement in an aesthetic rather than medical/surgical manner.+mw163475.jpg)
Recently, the Garden Museum, located in the old church next
to Lambeth Palace, has acquired a very striking painting by Harold Gilman,
depicting a tall man wearing work clothes of
white shirt and dark grey trousers, standing with a garden spade and
some garden pots. It dates from 1905 and
looks as if it meant to represent a gardener, even though the figure is shown
barefoot and in a blank, apparently interior space. 
