Watercolour by Margaret Gillies entitled 'Trust: A female figure leaning on a rock'. Great Britain, ca.1852-1887.

Watercolour depicting a full length female figure in thick white robes, leaning against a rock.

Dixon Bequest

Financial difficulties in her family meant that for Gillies art was a livelihood, not a diversion. She was for many years a successful painter of portrait miniatures whose subjects included Wordsworth and Dickens. In 1851 she went to Paris to study painting; on her return she began to produce romantic figure subjects such as this. Roget, in his history of the Old Watercolour Society (where Gillies exhibited from 1852 until her death), described her themes as 'maiden's sentiment and woman's sorrow'. Such allegorical pictures which showed beautiful young women as the personifications of conventional virtues were immensely popular, and her work was often engraved to reach a wider audience.

1187-1886