One theory as to how the lost portrait ended up in Africa is a connection with George Henry Lewes, best known as the lover of writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Lewes was already married with children when he met Eliot (and his wife was in a relationship with Thornton Leigh Hunt). In 1865 the Lewes’s eldest son Charles married Gertrude Hill, the adopted daughter of Margaret Gillies and Thomas Southwood Smith.
Charles Lewes’s brothers, Herbert and Thornton, both moved to South Africa, settling in what was then called Natal. Perhaps, one of the brothers took the painting with him? Or perhaps there is some other unknown explanation as to how this small, beautiful portrait, ended up so far away from where Margaret Gillies had painted it.
A new home
The portrait has now returned to London. In October 2019, it was unveiled in its new home, The Charles Dickens Museum. It looks across the study to Dickens’s desk, a reminder of a young idealistic man who so desperately wanted to make the world a kinder, more charitable place.
Following the death of her lover, in Italy, in 1861, Margaret Gillies set up home in London with her sister Mary. Margaret died in 1887, a month before her 84th birthday. Through the rediscovery of the lost portrait, the name of Margaret Gillies is returning, albeit slowly, to the public consciousness. Her obituaries wrote of a grande dame of the art world, but glossed over her private life, although Gillies would hopefully have been gratified by an obituary in the Derbyshire Advertiser which described her as a “pioneer” of female artists, who had smoothed the way for “all the sister-women who have come after”.
Probably the obituary writers knew nothing of the real life of this woman, who had crawled through suffocatingly hot mining tunnels, sketching heartrending images of women and child workers, who were often forced to strip while working, to escape death by heat exhaustion. Gillies’s legacy remains in the works she produced, her illustrations as shocking and heart rending as Dickens’s writing – just far less frequently remarked upon today.
Lucinda Hawksley is the author of Dickens’s Artistic Daughter, Katey
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