Maeve Gilmore
Francesca Wade, London Review of Books
July 2022
To advertise simultaneous exhibitions of their paintings at two London galleries in 1939, Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake posed for a photograph at their home in Maida Vale. Peake, wearing a flamboyant floral tie, sits in the foreground, his looming shadow on the wall behind him. He is drawing a charcoal portrait of Gilmore, who stands silhouetted against the window, paintbrush in hand, absorbed in her work. The easel is turned away from the camera, so it’s impossible to tell whether she’s painting a picture of her husband or something else entirely. In her memoir, A World Away (1970), an account of their life together from which she is remarkably absent, Gilmore describes the thrill of meeting Peake on her first day at the Westminster School of Art. He was the teacher, she the student, a dynamic that mapped easily onto married life. […]