# Sotheby's October Modern British Sales now live Canonical article: https://arthistory.news/news/sotheby-s-october-modern-british-sales-now-live-ff99a075-d620-44f6-b90c-f341db5f02ad By ArtHistory.News Published: 2026-10-05T09:00:38.677Z A vivid 1913-14 portrait by Harold Gilman, unseen at auction for decades, is among the standout works in Sotheby’s Modern British & Irish Art Evening Auction in London on 14 October. Harold Gilman’s 'Mary L.', painted in 1913-14, is one of the most compelling early British modernist pictures appearing at auction this autumn. Estimated at £250,000-350,000, the painting will be offered as Lot 510 in Sotheby’s Modern British & Irish Art Evening Auction on 14 October. The portrait dates from a crucial moment in Gilman’s brief career. A founder member of the Camden Town Group, he had initially worked closely in the orbit of Walter Sickert, but by the early 1910s was developing a far more individual response to French Post-Impressionism. Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Vuillard were particularly important influences. Gilman increasingly replaced the muted tonalities associated with Camden Town painting with thicker paint, stronger outlines and an unexpectedly brilliant palette. 'Mary L.' captures that transformation beautifully. The sitter is seen in profile against an intensely patterned pink-red wallpaper, her pale clothing picked out with passages of blue, green and cream. Rather than allowing the decorative background to remain passive, Gilman makes it almost as visually insistent as the figure herself. The result has something of Vuillard's intimacy, but also the weight and directness that became distinctively Gilman's. It is a painted at the moment when the artist was establishing the mature style for which he is now most admired. The painting was included in the important joint exhibition 'Paintings by Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner' at London's Goupil Gallery in April and May 1914, where it appeared as Mary Z., apparently a catalogue misprint for Mary L. Walter Taylor probably acquired the painting from that exhibition. It later entered the collection of the painter and influential collector Hugh Blaker, before passing to another artist-collector, Edward Le Bas, by 1939. The work has since appeared in a remarkable succession of exhibitions devoted to Gilman and the Camden Town Group, including shows at the Royal Academy in 1963 and the major 'Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town' exhibition at Nottingham's Djanogly Gallery in 2018-19. Gilman's development was abruptly curtailed when he died during the influenza pandemic in 1919, aged just 43. The strength of paintings such as 'Mary L.' makes the question of what might have followed all the more tantalising. More than a century after its first exhibition, Sotheby's sale provides a rare opportunity to reassess an artist whose place in the development of British modernism increasingly looks larger than his relatively short career might suggest. ## Illustrations Harold Gilman 1876 - 1919, Mary L. , signed H. Gilman \(lower left\) oil on canvas Sothebys [Image source](). ## Sources - [ArtHistory.News editor: ArtHistory.News editor]() ## Related records - [Harold Gilman]() Please cite the canonical article URL above. Image credits and reproduction rights remain with their respective holders.