Interior belongs to one of the most significant episodes of Harold Gilman’s career in which he often painted his lodgings in Maple Street, London. These paintings treat still-life and genre subjects with poignant intimacy in a mode of bright, pungent colour and glutinous impasto. They have long been recognised as canonical modern British paintings of their time, and their modernist idiom followed directly from Roger Fry’s recently coined concept of ‘Post-Impressionism’. As with all of Gilman’s paintings at the time Interior was painstakingly studied from life. Every aspect of the subject was scrutinised and modelled by the juxtaposition of pure colours, rather than grading areas of light and shadow using the artist’s choice of tones. This method required disciplined, dispassionate observation of individual elements in the scene, and the result was dissonant juxtapositions of colour, as where the purple flowers are contiguous with the salmon-coloured wallpaper pattern. Paint was applied with a loaded brush, and the entire surface is encrusted with richly textured impasto laid wet-on-wet. Each application was motivated by some observation from life, yet the result was an abnormally intense luminosity. Such workmanship rejected ‘slap-dash, careless and slick painting’, as Gilman’s friend Charles Ginner explained. For the art historian Charles Harrison, Gilman’s ‘procedure eliminated the possibility of fudging, getting it half-right, achieving elegance at the expense of description.’ Harrison went on: ‘no other English painter at the time did as much as he to devalue those bravura technical practices and mannerisms which were conventionally allowed to abbreviate the procedures of description.’ In paintings such as Interior, Gilman showed himself a modernist who had lost none of the old faith in fidelity to appearances.

Interior is composed from three sharply defined spatial recessions, which are flattened to emphasise the shape and proportions of the canvas. The background is filled by the wall of the room, with panelling below the dado rail and brightly coloured wallpaper above. In the midground, a single bed with a painted red frame is pushed against the wall. It is covered with a patterned counterpane, and immediately beside it there is a spindle chair and a patterned textile that covers an occasional table cropped from view. (The textile was depicted in at least two other still-life paintings, see figs. 5 and 6.) In the foreground, the curved edge of the breakfast table creates a horizontal division of the picture plane that echoes the dado line above it. There stands on the table a blue-and-white china vase, filled with a fresh bunch of cut flowers (perhaps camassias), which is in turn placed upon a matching square trivet. Within these elementary divisions of the picture plane, Gilman produced richly exaggerated surface effects of paint texture and colour contrasts, especially between the wallpaper and the flowers.

The vase and square trivet were bought by Gilman on a visit to Spain in 1903. The vase is decorated with a cartouche design which is topped by a crown, and the trivet has a raised circle motif at each corner. They appear together and apart in a considerable number of still-life paintings by Gilman made over a wide span of time. Among Gilman’s Edwardian interiors made before 1908 or so, the vase held flowers and nestled among other ornaments in table-top and sideboard arrangements: Still Life (n.d., Private Collection); Interior (1907, Southampton City Art Gallery); and Still Life (c. 1908, Fitzwilliam Museum). In more stylistically advanced paintings, it appeared in similar settings such as Still Life (c. 1909, Private Collection). In his room at Maple Street, besides Interior he also painted the trivet alone in two paintings of circa 1915: Still Life with Pears on a Plate (Fenton House, National Trust); and Still Life or Cup and Saucer (Private Collection). The vase and trivet were also included on the table at the lower left-hand corner of Interior with Mrs Mounter (1916–17, Ashmolean Museum).
 
The colourful patterned wallpaper in the background of Interior identifies the setting as the front north-facing room of 47 Maple Street, London, off Tottenham Court Road and due south of Fitzroy Square. Gilman had rooms there (probably on the first floor) between 1914 and 1917. His landlady Mrs Mounter modelled for several paintings in these rooms, and these along with certain genre scenes are universally ranked as the artist’s most accomplished works. These paintings record the artist’s own private apartment, and the artist’s acquaintance Louis F. Fergusson described how Gilman cherished his immediate surroundings and transformed them in his work:

"Gilman’s breakfast! That was what Gilman liked painting—the intimate subject immediately to hand. He surrounded himself with objects that soon took on the character, even in his temporary Camden Town apartments, of household gods, and then set himself lovingly to paint them—a pair of contorted Indian figures, a mysterious Japanese painting on glass, a squat and sinister Chinese deity. He gloried in the wall-paper of his sitting-room at Maple Street."

Around 1913, Gilman began to juxtapose contrasting opaque colours applied in richly textured impasto. Crisp touches of the brush were cleanly distinguishable, and monochrome areas of starkly contrasting colours were placed side by side. It was a style rooted in the example of Vincent Van Gogh who ‘he came to consider, eventually, as the greatest of all modern painters’, as his friend Charles Ginner wrote after his death. He first admired Van Gogh’s work in the Grafton Galleries’ exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910, which was organised and selected by Roger Fry, and thereafter he sought to educate himself further during visits to Paris. After Gilman’s death, Wyndham Lewis evoked the important position Van Gogh occupied in his friend’s life:

"If you went into his room, you would find Van Gogh’s Letters on his table: you would see post cards of Van Gogh’s paintings beside the favourites of his own hand. When he felt very pleased with a painting he had done latterly, he would hang it up in the neighbourhood of a photograph of a painting by Van Gogh."

Lewis further described the phase of his work that began around 1913, and its special debt to Charles Ginner. He characterised it as a ‘plunge into the Signac palette and a brighter scheme of things’, brought on by ‘a rather rapid assimilation (much speeded up by his new friend) of the modes in Paris that immediately succeeded the Impressionists.’ In paintings of 47 Maple Street such as Interior, Gilman first achieved a mature personal style which was closely related to ‘post-impressionism’ yet distinctively his own owing to the particular and unmistakeable intermingling of style and faithfully observed subjects.

Gilman’s colour choices did indeed become dramatically brighter, especially in areas of shadow. He came to model light and shadow with contrasting areas of colour devoid of transitional mid-tones. Colours were mixed on the palette before application and applied cleanly in discrete areas. One of the earliest works made in this style was Leeds Market (c. 1913, Tate), and Interior is another example of this style. The counterpane on the bed is built up with singular touches—or points, à la Signac and pointillisme—of three or four bright contrasting colours: warm pink, mint green, pale blue. Each point of colour has a crisp, raised texture. Other areas of the picture were painted in solid, unmodulated hues: the panelling is singularly brown; the turquoise of the wallpaper is also uniform. In these areas, painted was applied with a strong sense of method. The narrow bands of turquoise wallpaper were laid on with long, coursing vertical strokes or short, brisk horizontal ones. These unmodulated areas of colour complement and contrast with others in which Gilman went through new modulations with almost every stroke, most especially in the flowerheads and the reflections in the polished table.

Interior was painted on a colourman’s stretched canvas supplied by Percy Young of 137 Gower Street (a stone’s throw from Gilman’s bedsit). The company name and address are impressed on the top stretcher bar. Young supplied the stretched canvases for other paintings that Gilman made at this time including Interior with Mrs Mounter (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and Young was used by other artists in Gilman’s circle including Sickert and Spencer Gore.

The art historian James Beechey has suggested that Interior was possibly exhibited in the fourth London Group exhibition in 1916 (no. 72). At the London Group, Gilman exhibited works called ‘Interior’ on four occasions: first in 1915 (no. 19); again in 1916 (no. 72); and two more in 1917 (nos. 50 and 53). The artist’s self-consciously austere choice of titles makes specific identifications complicated, although informed suppositions were made by Andrew Causey and Richard Thomson for the Arts Council’s Gilman exhibition in 1981. Contrary to Beechey, they used uncited newspaper descriptions to argue that no. 72 in the 1916 exhibition was Tea in the Bedsitter (1916, Huddersfield Art Gallery), and that the same picture was exhibited again at the London Group in November 1917 (no. 53). Regarding that ‘Interior’ shown in 1915, Causey and Thomson suggested two candidates: Interior (c. 1915, Private Collection); and Interior with a Washstand (c. 1915, Art Gallery of South Australia).

The early provenance of this painting is not known, although it is thought to have been exhibited in Gilman’s lifetime owing to his addition of a signature. It is believed to have been in South Africa for a considerable time, possibly as early as 1936 when a work of this title (‘Interior’, no. 424) was included in the Empire Exhibition at Johannesburg Art Gallery that year, along with three other paintings by Gilman. It was acquired from an auction house in Praetoria, South Africa, by a private collector from Johannesburg, and has been owned by Piano Nobile since 2025.