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Leighton

Fine Art

15th–20th Century Original Paintings

JACQUELINE GILSON

( 1912 - 1991 )

Gilson grew up in an intellectual household — she was the daughter of the philosopher Étienne Gilson of the Académie française — and trained under Maurice Denis. Her father used her paintings to illustrate some of his own books. Her studio contents came to auction in 2024 alongside those of Dany Lartigue, both having been collected after the war by the same pair of avant-garde-minded collectors.

This canvas is characteristic of her work around 1950. The composition is flattened and heavily patterned: a burning vermilion sky occupies the upper third, edged by a jagged sawtooth of green and ochre foliage, with a flat pink-red disc of sun set slightly right of centre. Slender curved tree trunks in olive and crimson cut vertically across the picture like leading. Below and behind, a village of white houses with steep red roofs, dark hedges, and a patchwork of green, brown and gold fields locked together as interlocking planes rather than as receding space.

The Denis lesson is visible in the decorative flatness and the frank arbitrary colour, but the touch is rougher and more graphic — closer to the Fauve-derived School of Paris idiom of the early fifties.

Title: “The Red Sun"

Signature: Signed lower left and dated 1951

Provenance: Private collection - France

Medium: Oil on board

Size: c. 20 x 29 inches unframed

Condition: Unrestored - a little dirty

Jacqueline Gilson was a French painter of the interwar Catholic revival, a muralist and easel painter who brought a rigorous, structured art to religious and everyday subjects alike. She was the daughter of Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), the great philosopher and historian of medieval thought, and grew up in a cultivated, intellectual household that shaped the seriousness of her vision.

She trained under Maurice Denis, the Nabi painter and leading figure of the sacred-art revival, and worked within the Ateliers d'Art Sacré — the workshops founded by Denis and George Desvallières to renew Christian art between the wars — where she collaborated directly with Desvallières himself. It was in this milieu, devoted to restoring dignity and modern feeling to religious painting, that Gilson turned to fresco and monumental decoration. Crossing the Atlantic, she painted a large Stations of the Cross for the chapel of the Basilian Fathers in Toronto, a significant commission that testifies to her standing as a decorator of sacred spaces.

Her mature work is disciplined and firmly constructed, in keeping with the ideals of the Art Sacré movement. Yet her early paintings show another, freer side of her gift. Made in 1935 and 1936, during her travels through Europe and America, they have the poetry of spontaneity — depicting a serene and playful world in which sensitivity seems to sublimate ordinary things, touched by a quiet magic. Across a long career devoted to painting, from these luminous early canvases to her ambitious murals, Jacqueline Gilson remained faithful to an art of conviction and grace. She died in 1991.

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Images

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Frames

Any frames photographed are provided with paintings free of charge and we make no warranty on their condition. Glass is not shipped with paintings due to risk of damage.

Certificate of Authenticity

A Certificate of Authenticity is available at a charge of £20 GBP per painting. Please request this directly with us & allow 3 days for origination.

_gsrx_vers_1680 (GS 9.8.3 (1680))