Thirty-nine years after her death, the artist Maeve Gilmore is finally having her first institutional solo show. A display of 20 paintings, selected in consultation with her family and on show at Studio Voltaire in London, reveal her to be a shrewd and loving observer of domestic life, who took particular delight in the playfulness of her children as they lost themselves in gymnastic stunts or in games of dressing-up and cat’s cradle.
Gilmore was a painter, writer and illustrator whose early promise in the 1930s was disrupted first by war and then by marriage to Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast trilogy of novels, whose career she put selflessly before her own. She did not shrink from depicting the darker side of the maternal lot, most strikingly in a picture of a small boy clawing for attention at his mother’s skirts while she, bare breasted, holds a flower out of his reach. The shadow of the flower falls on the wall behind her like the silhouette of an axe.
