Gilman was married, for the second time, in the late summer of 1917 to Sylvia Hardy, an artist who had studied with him since 1914. He rarely let slacken his ability to isolate and transcribe the mood of his model - he was particularly sensitive to women and preferred them as sitters, showing a penchant for withdrawn expressions of melancholy and vulnerability. Gesture he preferred to keep to a minimum and he recognised the character of hands, rarely leaving them out of his compositions. Gilman's interiors are about people and their activities - the way they occupy rooms and share spaces with inanimate objects. In this respect his work is close to the 17th century Dutch painters like Vermeer and de Hoogh. Vermeer's reputation was growing at this time and the two paintings by which he is represented at the National Gallery were both fairly recent acquisitions in 1917.