London Street Scene in Snow evokes a winter’s afternoon. The sky is paling to dusk and the pavements are cleared of all activity except for a single passer-by and a snow-covered cart. Following in the footsteps of the French Impressionists, Harold Gilman took the familiar genre of the snow scene popularised by Claude Monet and transmuted it to the greasy winter streets of north London. Aside from the painting’s metropolitan setting, Gilman’s approach to colour is also novel and demonstrates a remarkable range, pushing to its limits the precept of ‘observing colour in the shadows’. The road is rendered in a shade of eau-de-nil green where the snow has been sullied by cartwheel tracks; in the untouched snow at the edges of the road and on the pavements, many gradations of blue, white and green have been used. On the rooftops, hues of lilac and blue predominate. The colouristic subtlety used to evoke the scene is underpinned by a substantial, impasto execution: the entire surface of the canvas is covered with rich, even strokes of the brush.

A number of years earlier, a similar composition to London Street Scene in Snow was used by Gilman’s friend Spencer Gore (fig. 1). Though it is not the same street, certain features in Gilman’s painting are similar to Gore’s: an oblique view of the street, a lamppost situated in a prominent position, a cart positioned at the side of the road, the sky cropped to the upper limit of the canvas, and a set of railings in the foreground. Some of these similarities suggest the sameness of London, though certain compositional devices indicate a common outlook. The upright of the lamppost helps to emphasise the parameters of the canvas. Both works have a distinctively ‘Camden Town Group’ mood, moreover, giving the viewer a sense of surveying a small portion of the universe which is summed up in the hoi polloi of north London. Both Gilman and Gore’s paintings should be regarded as modernist iterations of Leon Battista Alberti’s method in fifteenth-century Florence: ‘First of all, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.’

Gilman’s position at the forefront of modernist British art was underpinned by his consecutive membership of three avant-garde exhibiting societies. He played a formative role in the Fitzroy Street Group, established 1907, a venture initially organised by Walter Sickert. In the Camden Town Group, established 1911, Gilman was a defining contributor alongside Sickert, Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner. He was also a founding member of the London Group, established 1913, which included a more diverse mixture of painters. In paintings like London Street Scene in Snow, Gilman achieved the marriage of workaday subject-matter and substantial, painterly execution which came to define this era of modernist art in Britain. Writing in 1981, the historian Charles Harrison praised Gilman effusively and singled him out as the most significant contributor in the formation of a modernist style.

Though the principal subject of Gilman’s career was the figure in an interior, he also produced a small number of highly distinctive London scenes. The subject of London’s streets, busy thoroughfares and leafy squares has come to define how the Camden Town Group milieu is perceived; much was made of these paintings in the Tate Britain’s 2008 exhibition Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group. Gilman executed a number of these paintings in 1911/12, including Clarence Gardens NW, London (Ferens Art Gallery) and Mornington Crescent (National Museum of Wales). Not until the winter of 1917, however, did he return to this theme. The location of the street in snow is uncertain. Gilman painted this composition in two versions, one smaller (the present painting) and one larger (fig. 2). Though the outlook adopted in both paintings is identical, the happenings in each are slightly different. The larger version omits the cart and passers-by, replacing them with two figures walking together a little way down the street. Writing in 1981, J. Wood Palmer noted of the larger painting that ‘both its colour and tight brushwork, as well as the fact that it is a winter picture, make late 1917 the earliest date [for this work].’ The same applies to the smaller London Street Scene in Snow.

This painting was given by Harold Gilman to his friend and fellow artist Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954). McKnight Kauffer was a distinguished proponent of Vorticism, producing personally distinctive graphic art and poster designs. His most famous work is Flight (1917), a schematised woodcut of birds in flight. Gilman’s painting has remained in the family’s private collection until now and has not previously been offered for sale.