Forgotten artist Maeve Gilmore comes into her own
Hermione Eyre, Apollo
April 2022
Maeve Gilmore (1917–83) is one of the 20th century’s ‘known unknowns’. As a painter of promise in the 1930s, Gilmore exhibited paintings at the Redfern and Wertheim galleries. Then, throughout her marriage to Mervyn Peake, she continued to paint, draw and show occasionally (two solo exhibitions, 40 years apart), never disappearing, always maintaining her own studio in a room at home. She was praised decorously by those in their circle as ‘a gifted painter in her own right’, as the poet Michael Moorcock said, yet subsumed into the public role of guardian for the fantastical imaginative world of Peake, so much so that during Peake’s long illness she wrote the final instalment of his Gormenghast sequence herself – Titus Awakes was finally published in 2011. […]