Painted during Maeve Gilmore’s celebrated mature period, the present work is rendered in a highly expressive style that captures her renewed artistic expression in the late 1960s. As the health of her husband, Mervyn Peake declined, Gilmore’s secular style gave way to more spiritually inspired imagery. The present work recalls the powerful figurative language in Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, 1937, which Gilmore saw first hand at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. Like Guernica, Portrait of Mervyn Peake - the Artist’s Husband, uses a strikingly simplified palette to convey the subject of grief. Oversized hands reach upwards in despair yet the sublime halo of black and gestural red markings simultaneously convey a divine experience.

Much of Gilmore’s work is autobiographical, offering an insight into her experience of family life from a keenly feminine perspective. In the later stages of her career, following Peake’s death in 1968, she developed a radical pared-back, semi-abstract style, which many herald as her best work. Earlier paintings, such as Boys at Play, Darjeeling Mail, circa 1958, hint towards the abstracted backgrounds and clearly outlined bodies found in her later work. Gilmore’s domestic gaze is underpinned by a deep understanding of international avant-garde and modernist movements, which she experienced during her travels in Europe. As well as surrealist inspired dreamlike compositions, her paintings capture the drama and emotion of Old Masters contemplating life and death and religious scenes that she would have encountered during her convent education and devout Irish Catholic upbringing.