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The Polish artist Stanislawa de Karlowska had been married to Gilman's friend and fellow Camden Town painter Robert Bevan since 1897. A painter of townscapes, interiors, and still lifes, Karlowska showed her work regularly-under her own name-throughout her life: in the exhibitions of the London Group, to which she was elected in 1914, and in 1935 in her one-woman show at the Adams Gallery. But her career was largely overshadowed by that of her husband.
In this portrait of Karlowska, one of four Gilman painted between 1910 and 1919, the artist revels in the expressive power of the paint itself. He exploits the clash of garish colors, busy patterns, and passages of thick impasto with the markedly quiet demeanor and pose of the sitter. More than an investigation of his sitter's character, the work is an exploration of paint and color.
Karlowska's profile position hinders any reading of character into her facial features, largely blocked from view and painted only summarily. Her pose relegates her to a primarily decorative status; her presence becomes analogous to the papered walls that provide the backdrop against which she sits. Her body, face, hair, and clothing allow Gilman to create lively patterns, textures, and juxtapositions of colors that are vehicles for his exploration of the play of light and color. He toys with distinctions of figure and ground, heightening the similarities in pattern and color between the sitter's bright striped chemise and those of the papered surface behind it. Her torso nearly fuses with its backdrop, the vertical stripe on her sleeve echoing the red-, yellow-, and green-dotted stripe on the wall behind her. The overarching verticality of the image is interrupted only by the thick blotches of paint that dot the walls, her sleeve, her hair, and her face. More than a portrait, Gilman's painting resembles a carefully constructed, colorful still-life whose subject happens to be a woman. Gilman's choice of a profile pose places the image within the tradition of classical portraiture, harking back to busts of rulers on antique coins and to painted portraits of the Renaissance; profile portraits carry the most historical of associations, ultimately referring to the mythic origins of portraiture (which according to the first-century writer Pliny began with the tracing of the shadow of a man's head on a wall). Gilman's modern variation on this ancient theme is to set his profile portrait in an intimate, domestic interior.
Early in his career Gilman had been much influenced by the tonal, atmospheric compositions of Whistler, and around the time of Whistler's memorial exhibition of 1905, he painted a number of portraits evoking this by-then acknowledged modern master. Later Gilman began to exploit un-Whistlerian passages of thick impasto and a high-keyed palette as a means of expression. With this portrait of his friend and colleague, he seems to look back to the contemplative feeling of his Whistlerian paintings-his sitter's quiet attitude and composed demeanor are reminiscent of Whistler's famous painting of his mother-while still employing the charged palette of his mature style. The founder and leader of the Camden Town Group, Walter Sickert, increasingly found fault with Gilman's use of paint. In 1914 he published an article that berated the younger generation's new fondness for heavy impasto: intentional and rugged impasto…so far from producing brilliancy, covers a picture with a grey reticulation and so throws dust in the eyes of the spectator, and serves, to some extent, to veil exaggerations of colour or coarseness of drawing. It is a manner of shouting and gesticulating and does not make for expressiveness and lucidity.1
Gilman nevertheless continued in his quest to define his own style and technique. But during the last years of his short life, as if in unwitting response to Sickert's criticism, his handling did become smoother, his surfaces more even, and his colors cooler.

[1] Baron 1979, 67. Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 178, no. 73, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)