Margaret Gillies (7 August 1803 – 20 July 1887) was a London-born Scottish
miniaturist
A portrait miniature is a miniature portrait painting, usually executed in gouache, watercolor, or enamel. Portrait miniatures developed out of the techniques of the miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and were popular among 16th-century eli ...
and
watercolour
Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to ...
ist.
Biography
Gillies was the second daughter of William Gillies, a Scottish merchant in
Throgmorton Street
Throgmorton Street is a road in the City of London that runs between Lothbury in the west and Old Broad Street in the east. Throgmorton Avenue runs from the north side of Throgmorton Street to London Wall.
History
It is named after Nicholas T ...
, London, and his wife Charlotte Hester Bonnor (died 1811), daughter of Thomas Bonnor. Having lost their mother when Margaret was eight years old, and their father having met with business reverses, she and her older sister,
Mary
Mary may refer to:
People
* Mary (name), a feminine given name (includes a list of people with the name)
Religious contexts
* New Testament people named Mary, overview article linking to many of those below
* Mary, mother of Jesus, also call ...
(1800–1870), were placed under the care of their uncle,
Adam Gillies, Lord Gillies
Adam Gillies, Lord Gillies (1760–1842) was a Scottish judge.
Life
He was born in Brechin, Forfarshire on 29 April 1766, the son of Margaret (née Smith) and Robert Gillies, he was the younger brother of historian John Gillies.
Gillies was ...
. They were educated by him, and then introduced to Edinburgh society.
Before she was twenty, Gillies decided to earn her own living, and returned with her sister to her father's home in London. Mary Gillies became an author, while Margaret took the direction of a professional artist. She received lessons in miniature-painting from Frederick Cruikshank, and gained a reputation for it. Cruikshank's style was based on that of
Andrew Robertson
Andrew Henry Robertson (born 11 March 1994) is a Scottish professional footballer who plays as a left-back for club Liverpool and captains the Scotland national team.
Robertson began his senior career with Queen's Park in 2012 before joi ...
.
In the early 1830s
Thomas Southwood Smith, a physician,
Unitarian and a pioneer in the improvement of the health of the poor, particularly in London, separated from his second wife, Mary, and went to live with Gillies and her sister Mary.
The 1841 census records Margarett Gillies as aged 35 living at Hortet's Terrace, St.Pancras with Thomas Smith aged 50, Gertrude Hill aged 3, Harriet Lebe 21 and Sarah Hargrove 15.
Smith and Gillies lived together at Hillside, Fitzroy Park,
Highgate from 1844.
Smith, an ordained Unitarian minister, and Gillies associated with the group around the ''
Monthly Repository
The ''Monthly Repository'' was a British monthly Unitarian periodical which ran between 1806 and 1838. In terms of editorial policy on theology, the ''Repository'' was largely concerned with rational dissent. Considered as a political journal, i ...
'', a Unitarian periodical; Mary Gillies was involved in editing it from 1836.
Margaret Gillies illustrated in 1842 Smith's first report as a mines inspector, on a tour in Leicestershire and West Yorkshire.
Around 1850 Gillies' studio was at 36 Percy Street, where she briefly gave a home to the "auto-icon" of
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham (; 15 February 1748 Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">O.S._4_February_1747.html" ;"title="Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New Style dates">O.S. 4 February 1747">Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.htm ...
,
on whose cadaver Southwood Smith had conducted a highly controversial public dissection in 1832.
She went in 1851 to Paris for a year, where she worked in the studios of
Hendrik and
Ary Scheffer
Ary Scheffer (10 February 179515 June 1858) was a Dutch-French Romantic painter. He was known mostly for his works based on literature, with paintings based on the works of Dante, Goethe, and Lord Byron, as well as religious subjects. He was als ...
, and on her return to England she exhibited some portraits in oils.
She then concentrated on watercolour painting, typically choosing domestic, romantic, or sentimental subjects, for which she was best known.
She joined the
Society of Female Artists
The Society of Women Artists (SWA) is a British art body dedicated to celebrating and promoting fine art created by women. It was founded as the Society of Female Artists (SFA) in about 1855, offering women artists the opportunity to exhibit and ...
in 1856.
In 1854, short of money, they had moved to The Pines, near
Weybridge, but Gillies kept a studio in 6 Southampton Street, off
Fitzroy Square, later renumbered
27 Conway Street.
The 1861 census records Mary Gillies 60, authoress and Margaret Gillies 56, Artist in Water Colours, living at Heath House, Weybridge with Thomas S Smith, 72, physician and widower, his son Herman Smith 40, Wine merchant, his granddaughter Gertrude Hill 23, lady, and also a cook and servant.
Thomas Southwood Smith died in
Florence, Italy
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...
in 1861.
After Smith's death, Margaret and Mary Gillies lived for many years at
25 Church Row, Hampstead, and worshipped at the Unitarian Chapel,
Rosslyn Hill
Rosslyn Hill is a road in London, connecting the south end of Hampstead High Street to the north end of Haverstock Hill. It is the site of the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, St. Stephen's Church and the Royal Free Hospital. It is served by the ...
. Living with her was Charles Lewes, son of
George Lewes the lover of
George Eliot, and his wife Gertrude, Southwood Smith's granddaughter.
Mary died in 1870 and early in 1887
Margaret moved to The Warren,
Crockham Hill, Kent, where she died later that year, on the 20th July, of
pleurisy, after a few days' illness.
Among her pupils was
Marian Emma Chase, and she gave early encouragement to
Anna Mary Howitt
Anna Mary Howitt, Mrs Watts (15 January 1824 – 23 July 1884) was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter, writer, feminist and spiritualist. Following a health crisis in 1856, she ceased exhibiting professionally and became a pioneering drawing me ...
and the portraitist Mary Field, wife of the architect
Horace Field
Horace Field was a London-born architect. His work was often in a Wrenaissance style, as well as other post-gothic English historical revival styles, with influences from the Arts and Crafts movement and Richard Norman Shaw. His commissions inc ...
.
In 1866 Margaret bought a grave plot in the
dissenters' section of the western side of
Highgate Cemetery
Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East Cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as ...
for a stillborn baby of Charles and Gertrude Lewes. Mary was later interred in this grave on the 23rd July 1870, as was Catherine, the widow of the poet and critic
Richard Hengist Horne, on the 6th September 1893. In the adjoining grave rests
Caroline Southwood Hill
Caroline Southwood Hill ( Smith; 21 March 1809 – 31 December 1902) was an English educationalist and writer. She established and ran a Pestalozzian infant school, was involved in many co-operative ventures, and moved in a radical circle of othe ...
(buried on 3rd January 1903), Southwood Smith's daughter and mother of the social reformers
Miranda Hill
Miranda Hill (Wisbech 1836–1910) was an English social reformer.
Biography
Hill was a daughter of James Hill (died 1872), a corn merchant, banker and follower of Robert Owen, and his third wife, Caroline Southwood Smith (1809–1902), a ...
and
Octavia Hill
Octavia Hill (3 December 1838 – 13 August 1912) was an English social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born into a family of radical t ...
, the latter of whom jointly founded the
National Trust. The ashes of Caroline's youngest daughter Florence was the last interment in December 1935. Although Margaret Gillies is memorialised on this grave she is buried elsewhere, presumably in Crockham Hill.
Works
Before she was 24, Gillies was commissioned to paint a miniature of
William Wordsworth, and stayed at
Rydal Mount for several weeks.
She has three oil paintings in British national collections—in Aberystwyth, Nottingham and the National Portrait Gallery.
Pamela Gerrish Nunn wrote that she "combined an early-Victorian aesthetic with a mid-Victorian independence of mind".
Portrait artist
During the 1830s and 1840s Gillies was a career portrait artist, and for many successive years contributed portraits to the exhibitions of the
Royal Academy.
Her subjects included feminist figures:
Mary Leman Grimstone,
Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt (12 March 1799-30 January 1888) was an English poet, the author of the famous poem '' The Spider and the Fly''. She translated several tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Some of her works were written in conjunction with her husband, ...
and her daughter Anna Mary Howitt,
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau (; 12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist, focusing on race relations within much of her published material.Michael R. Hill (2002''Harriet Martineau: Theoreti ...
of the ''Monthly Repository'' group.
She also painted the poet and critic
Richard Hengist Horne and
Anne Marsh-Caldwell the novelist.
Her portrait of
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian er ...
, painted during the period when he was writing ''
A Christmas Carol
''A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas'', commonly known as ''A Christmas Carol'', is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. ''A Christmas Ca ...
'', was in the
Royal Academy of Arts' 1844 summer exhibition.
After viewing it there,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that it showed Dickens with "the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes".
A simplified form was used as the frontispiece of a book, ''A New Spirit of the Age'', in the same year. The painting's location was unknown, from later in Gillies' lifetime, when she was unable to trace it, until it was rediscovered in
Pietermaritzburg
Pietermaritzburg (; Zulu: umGungundlovu) is the capital and second-largest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was founded in 1838 and is currently governed by the Msunduzi Local Municipality. Its Zulu name umGungundlovu ...
, South Africa,
and acquired and restored by the art dealer
Philip Mould in 2018.
Watercolourist
In 1852 Gillies was elected an associate of the
Old Society of Painters in Water Colours, and was a contributor to its exhibitions for the rest of her life. Her exhibited works included:
* ''Past and Future'', 1855, and ''The Heavens are telling'', 1856, both of which were engraved
* ''Rosalind and Celia'', 1857
* ''Una and the Red Cross Knight in the Cavern of Despair'', ''An Eastern Mother'', and ''Vivia Perpetua in Prison'', 1858
* ''A Father and Daughter'', 1859
* ''Imogen after the Departure of Posthumus'', 1860
* ''Beyond'', 1861
* ''The Wanderer'', 1868
* ''Prospero and Miranda'', 1874
* ''Cercando Pace'', a drawing in three compartments, 1875
* ''The Pilgrimage'', exhibited at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition at Manchester in 1887
Her last work was ''Christiana by the River of Life'', exhibited in 1887.
Notes
;Attribution
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gillies, Margaret
Portrait miniaturists
Scottish watercolourists
1803 births
1887 deaths
Burials at Highgate Cemetery
Scottish portrait painters
Scottish women painters
Women watercolorists
19th-century Scottish painters
19th-century British women artists