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Leighton

Fine Art

15th–20th Century Original Paintings

JACQUELINE GILSON

( 1912 - 1991 )

A woman rides side-saddle through a harbour in the South of France, holding a scalloped parasol above her against a fierce ochre sky. Her grey mount — a donkey or small horse, head lowered and legs springing across the foreground — carries her past a jumble of boats, slanting masts and triangular sails, a blazing Mediterranean sun high at the right answered by golden star-bursts scattered through the design. Gilson flattens the whole scene into interlocking planes and holds every form within heavy black contours; the palette is earthen and restrained — black, umber, grey and cream — lit throughout by that insistent yellow-orange, the paint scrubbed dry and matt into the board.

The style is mid-century modernist, a personal fusion of late Cubism and Expressionism: forms simplified and fractured for design, space compressed, colour keyed for mood. Firmly structured yet warm and faintly primitivist, it shows the disciplined side of an artist schooled by Maurice Denis and the Ateliers d'Art Sacré, here turned from sacred subjects to a playful, sun-struck reverie of the Mediterranean coast.

Title: “L'Ombrelle"

Signature: Signed centre right and dated 1951

Provenance: Private collection - France

Medium: Oil on board

Size: c. 20 x 25 inches unframed / 27 x 32 inches framed

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

All photos are taken in a light tent using a Canon DSLR set on daylight settings.

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))