Biography
Maeve Gilmore (b.1917, London; d.1983, London) carefully constructed an interior world, replete with Surrealist imagery and centred on portraits of family, placing domestic scenes centre-stage. ‘I always seem to have been able to paint when there is intense life surrounding me,’ Gilmore wrote in 1968. ‘Despite the eternal meals, the fights of one’s children, and the constant demands of domesticity.’ Her paintings ‘made alone and imperatively,’ are a reflection of a romantic life, punctuated by war and illness and equally devoted to art-making as it was home-making and motherhood.
Reared by a traditional family, Gilmore was educated at a convent boarding school in Sussex before attending finishing school in Switzerland. She studied sculpture at the Westminster School of Art in London, where she met her future husband, the writer and artist Mervyn Peake (b.1911; d.1968), on her first day. She remembered him as ‘the most romantic-looking man she had ever seen.’ The beginning of their long and devoted relationship was, for her, the ‘beginning of living.’ Before their marriage, Gilmore travelled around Europe in 1937, witnessing the rise of fascism and Hitler’s rallies in Germany. She was greatly inspired by the Paris Exposition, where she saw Calder’s Mercury Fountain, Miró’s Catalan Peasant in Revolt and Picasso’s Guernica.
Upon return to Britain, Gilmore and Peake married and had three children. After World War II, they moved to Sark, in the Channel Islands. This proved a deeply stimulating time for both Peake and Gilmore. Peake published the first book of his landmark gothic series Gormenghast and Gilmore never ceased to paint, maintaining a studio in her family home throughout the decades. ‘In those attic rooms,’ Gilmore wrote, ‘the surrounding suburb disappeared, and I entered the world of my own making, and the familiar smell of turpentine.’ Her lyrical, highly personal vision of the world, filled with ‘totemic objects, bones, birds, and dreamlike scenes’ reflected a notable modernist sensibility.
As women’s roles in the Surrealist movement and beyond have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, Gilmore’s work has been compared to that of Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun and Vanessa Bell. Critic Lucy Scholes writes, ‘While the images are always drawn from real life, Gilmore uses carefully chosen objects with symbolic effect to achieve an atmosphere not quite of this world. But her surrealism is more grounded in the domestic than anything either Tanning or Carrington painted. It’s her richest subject, and the site in which she appears to have been most comfortable.’
Gilmore’s paintings and writings reflect the selfless care and love with which she lived her life. Though she is now considered one of the twentieth century’s ‘known unknowns’, for her, there never was a contradiction between womanly domesticity and a lifelong commitment to the arts. ‘I have never been able to divorce myself aesthetically, to decide between life and painting,’ Gilmore wrote. ‘My mainspring has always been the heart and not the head’.
