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Record #17737
Name :
: Maud Ethel EADES (1882 - 1961)
  aka : Maud Jago; Madge Gill


Father
:
Mother
:
BMD and other details
Date of Birth
: 1882

Marriage (1)
:
Marriage (2)
:

Date of Death
: 1961
Abode (1) : Place of BirthEngland, Essex, East Ham
Abode (2) : Place of Death / BurialEngland, Newham
Sailing Information
Date of Arrival
: 8 Aug 1896
Country
: Canada

Ship
: Scotsman

Placement Family
:
Homes / Agencys
Institution (GB)
:

Agency
: Barnardos
NotesIn 1896, Maud Jago, 12, arrived at Quebec, Canada, in a group of 254 Barnardo children accompanied by Mr. Owen and en route to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

In November 1900, Maud Eades, 18, domestic, returned to the United Kingdom on the ship Corinthian.

Born an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, (now Greater London), she spent much of her early years in seclusion and was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9. She was subsequently sent to Canada to work on a farm, where she stayed until she was 19 before moving back to East Ham to live with her aunt, who introduced her to Spiritualism and astrology. At the age of 25, she married her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. Together they had three sons with their second, Reginald, dying of the Spanish flu. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl and almost died herself, contracting a serious illness that left her bedridden for several months and blind in her left eye.

After recovering from her illness, she took a sudden and passionate interest in drawing, creating thousands of mediumistic works over the following 40 years, most done with ink in black and white. The works came in all sizes, from postcard-sized to huge sheets of fabric, some over 30 feet (9.1 m) long. She claimed to be guided by a spirit she called ?Myrninerest? (my inner rest) and often signed her works in this name. The figure of a young woman in intricate dress appeared thousands of times in her work, and is often thought to be a representation of herself or her lost daughter. She drew this woman in various moods and appearances, almost never showing her entire body, and with her clothes interwoven into the surrounding complex of lines and patterns.

She rarely exhibited her work and never sold any pieces out of fear of angering ?Myrninerest?. After her first son, Bob, died in 1958 she started drinking heavily and stopped drawing. Following her death in 1961, thousands of drawings were discovered in her home; the collection is owned by the London Borough of Newham and is in the care of the borough?s Heritage and Archives Service. It has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA (1992), Manor Park Museum, London (1999), The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006), Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (2007), Halle Saint Pierre, Paris (2008), and Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt a.M. (2010).


The Guardian
Friday 13th October 2006
By David Williams

A lifetime?s work preserved

THE life's work of one of east London's most prolific and collectable artists remains hidden in storage in Newham.

Madge Gill hoarded thousands of drawings over a period of 40 years, but hardly ever exhibited during her lifetime and never sold her work.

Today her art is highly prized by a cult following willing to pay thousands of pounds for a full-size piece, and much of it is owned and carefully kept by Newham Council's Heritage Service.

Due to its physical fragility and the lack of a space to show it, the collection is seen by the public almost as rarely as when the artist was alive, hiding it away under her bed and in her wardrobe.

Today Madge Gill is typically referred to as an Outsider Artist, as she was untutored and had worked more for herself than for public exhibition.

Her pictures are apparently inward-looking and private in meaning, and cannot be fitted into any wider artistic movement or category.

They do not appear to be influenced by the work of other non-Outsider artists whose work, however personal, is produced with the purpose of communicating with the world outside.

During her lifetime she was virtually unknown to the mainstream art world's network of galleries, exhibitions and critics.

Madge Gill was born Maude Ethel Eades in 1882, but as an illegitimate child she was hidden by her mother and sent to an orphanage, aged nine.

After a stint as a farm servant in Canada, she returned to east London to stay with an aunt, and at 25 married her cousin, a stockbroker named Thomas Edwin Gill.

However Madge showed no interest in drawing until her life was turned upside down by illness and personal tragedy.

Although it is always lurid, tacky and useless to explain an artist's work using nothing but a few sketchy biographical details, there are some key events in Madge Gill's life that at least give us a starting point for understanding her drawings.

Reggie, the second of her three sons, died in the global Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and the following year Madge gave birth to a stillborn baby girl before becoming ill herself, losing sight in one eye and being confined to bed for several months.

As she recovered, she began delving into the spiritualism her aunt had introduced her to years earlier and started producing drawings in the fluid, near-abstract style she used for the next 40 years.

Madge regularly held seances and maintained that her drawings were not her own work, but that of her spirit guide, Myrninerest, whose signature can be found on much of her work.

Although she occasionally exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery's annual East End Academy, she refused to sell her work, as she was reluctant to take ownership of it.

Often worked in bed by the light of an oil lamp or in total darkness, Madge Gill rendered her drawings in black or coloured inks on "found" materials including postcards, cardboard and in one case, a roll of calico more than 40ft long.

Her homes were in Plashet Grove, East Ham, and Thorngrove Road, Plaistow.

Her work is described as "mediumistic", and she apparently believed herself to be channelling images and symbols from an alternate reality where physical objects - such as fragments of architecture or the female form - break down into abstract lines and twisted geometerical shapes.

Although her drawing technique was not advanced, the work shows an expert eye for composition and arrangement of form and line.

A near-constant in Madge Gill's output are repeated, disembodied and doll-like faces. Although it is tempting to assume they represent herself, or the spirits of her children whose deaths apparently caused her to draw, she made very little public comment on her work and kept its meaning to herself.

In 1958, her son Bob died, and Madge Gill abruptly stopped drawing and turned to alcohol.

She died three years later, and after her death her work was donated by her family to the former County Borough of East Ham.

It first gained public recognition in 1979 at a Hayward Gallery show of Outsider Art. Since then it has been loaned for exhibition around the world, most recently at the Whitechapel Gallery's show, Inner Worlds Outside, which closed in June.

A few pieces are on permanent display in the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, and others are held by Outsider Collection, an archive donated to the Tate Gallery last year, but the vast majority is still owned by Newham Council.

When sold, pieces change hands for as much as ?2,000.


THE LIFE OF MADGE GILL
by Roger Cardinal
({website}madgegill.com/Biography)

Madge Gill (1882-1961) was an outstanding exponent of mediumistic art and remains one of the foremost British Outsider artists. She was born in the East End of London, where she spent the greater part of her life. Her birth certificate bears the name Maude Ethel Eades alongside that of her mother, Emma Eades, yet lacks all mention of a father. Given the opprobrium attaching in Victorian times to an illegitimate birth, Madge spent her early childhood sequestered from the world, brought up by her mother and Carrie, her aunt, under the strict eye of her grandfather. There came a time when the family decided it could no longer cope with this embarrassing child, and, even though her mother was still alive, the nine-year-old was committed to Dr Barnardo?s orphanage at Barkingside. Five years later, she was transported by ship to Canada with hundreds of other juveniles, beneficiaries of a large-scale child-labour scheme devised by the orphanage to offer youngsters a fresh start in the New World. The teenaged Madge became a domestic servant and babysitter on a series of Ontario farms. Records show that it was common for such young immigrants to be maltreated, and there is little doubt that Madge nourished a fervent longing to return to England. At the age of eighteen, she succeeded in re-crossing the Atlantic and, once back in London, found work as a nurse at Whipps Cross hospital, Leytonstone. For a while she lived with her aunt Kate, who introduced her to Spiritualism and mediumistic practices. In 1907, Madge married Tom Gill, Kate?s son and thus her cousin. The marriage turned out badly, and relations became unpleasant. Within six years, Madge gave birth to three sons, Laurie, Reggie and Bob; the second boy died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. A year later, Madge gave birth for the last time, but her longed-for daughter was stillborn, her body perfect but for a disfigurement down one side. (There is no record of any name being given to this child.) Madge herself came close to death, and a subsequent lengthy illness resulted in the loss of her left eye, which was replaced with a glass one.

It was some weeks after her return to health, on 3 March 1920, that Madge Gill was first ?possessed? by Myrninerest, her spirit-guide. Madge was now thirty-eight, and her contact with this phantom figure would be maintained without interruption throughout the rest of her life. In his 1926 text Myrninerest the Spheres, her son Laurie bears witness to his mother?s first experience of delirious trance-states, which she found overwhelming and frightening. He evokes a whole gamut of creative modes at that time: drawing, writing, knitting, crochet-work, weaving, piano-playing. All this took place under the auspices of Myrninerest, whose signature appeared regularly on the drawings. In 1922, Madge underwent treatment at a clinic for women?s diseases at Hove, on the south coast. While there, she confided a packet of drawings to a woman doctor, who brought them to the notice of the Society for Psychical Research in London. A document in its archives records the expert opinion of a Research Officer, who judged the drawings to be ?more of an inspirational than of an automatic kind?.

Madge Gill?s vicissitudes were far from over. Relations with her husband had deteriorated for some time past, and he had begun to seek female company outside the home. Young Bob was injured in a motorcycle accident and remained an invalid for two years: his mother devoted whole nights to sitting by his bedside, usually drawing or writing. In 1932, Tom was hospitalized, with a diagnosis of cancer. It was in this same year, at the age of fifty, that Madge participated for the first time in an annual exhibition of art by East End amateurs, mounted by the Whitechapel Gallery. She showed Reincarnation, a calico roll densely worked in coloured inks, which attracted national press coverage. Following Tom?s death in 1933, Madge continued to live with her sons, all three bound by a deep mutual affection. Until he died in 1948, her brother-in-law Bert Gill also lodged in the same house; he was an ardent follower of astrology.

From the 1930s on, Madge Gill enjoyed a reputation as a medium in her Upton Park neighbourhood. She is said to have organized s?ances at her home, drawing up horoscopes and offering spontaneous prophecies. It is not known for how long she conducted s?ances, though it seems likely that they lapsed after a few years. What continued unabated was her artistic production. While she still made heavily decorated cushions, quilts and dresses, her principal medium became ink-drawing, executed on postcards, sheets of paper or card, and long rolls of untreated calico cloth. Gill?s frenetic improvizations have an almost hallucinatory quality, each surface being filled with checkerboard patterns that suggest giddy, quasi-architectural spaces. Afloat upon these swirling proliferations are the pale faces of discarnate and nameless women, sketched perfunctorily, albeit with an apparent concern for beauty, and with startled expressions. It is tempting to interpret them in relation to Gill?s biography: is she referring to her lost daughter, her beloved aunts, or to some feminine ideal? Are these in a sense self-portraits, or rather: attempts to stabilize her own fragile being, as it were through fleeting snapshots? Another reading equates the faces with Myrninerest, envisaged as the artist?s otherworldly alter ego, immune to the traumas of actual life.

Gill?s craftsmanship is marked by unswerving perseverance. In a single evening, she was capable of getting through a dozen or more blank postcards, dating them conscientiously and adding Myrninerest?s familiar signature. To help her tackle the calico rolls, Laurie rigged up a mechanism which enabled the untreated areas to be exposed section by section, as the work proceeded. Madge was forced to stand upright for hours, wrestling with such technical problems as the scratchy surface and the tendency for ink to trickle downwards from the lifted pen. Unable to see the complete rolls inside the house, she would get her sons to rig them up in the back garden. In 1939, she exhibited one at the Whitechapel Gallery which, at almost forty metres wide, was probably her largest work ever: it occupied an entire gallery wall. She continued to exhibit annually at the Whitechapel till 1947. It is said she once turned down the offer of a show in an illustrious West End gallery, explaining that her works could not be sold, since they all belonged to Myrninerest. Sceptics have interpreted this supernatural reference as a convenient alibi, a way of deflecting attention from a compulsion she could not control, yet which remained indispensable to her life. Through the years, Gill rarely parted with her pictures, so that her lifetime?s production remained largely intact, hoarded in the attic of her East Ham house.

Thus is was that, for forty years, Madge Gill maintained the profile of the classic Outsider artist, pursuing a fertile and obstinate career with practically no audience and with no thought of selling her work. In 1950, her son Bob died; she had once prophesied that she would outlive him. Henceforth she would live alone with Laurie, always a loyal supporter of her artistry. She was now working on large sheets of card, completing them in batches of a hundred. She once confided to a cherished friend, a journalist called Louise Morgan, that every face she drew had significance, yet would say no more on the subject. One letter reveals that the artmaking had become a huge burden: ?Dear Louise, I wish I could be normal?. Another letter speaks admiringly of the aged American na?ve painter Grandma Moses.

During her last decade, Gill suffered from several ailments, and became self-absorbed and cantankerous. Eventually she hardly left the house, watched over by the faithful Laurie. She ended up working through the night in her bedroom, leaning with her one good eye over her images and succumbing to a seductive auto-hypnosis which distanced her from reality. Some neighbors spoke of her disturbing gaze, her eccentric remarks, her apparently deranged or drunken behavior. In 1961, in her dark Victorian house on Plashet Grove, with its solid furniture, and its homemade carpets and quilts, Madge Gill breathed her last, ten days after her seventy-ninth birthday. A good deal of her artwork would pass into the public domain and reach the art market, to the good fortune of Art Brut collectors such as Jean Dubuffet. Laurie Gill made a formal donation of the remainder of his inheritance to the local authorities, with the result that over 200 items are conserved today in the Newham municipal archives. In 1968, a retrospective held at the Grosvenor Gallery in the West End meant that the artist finally received an honour she had refused in her lifetime. A selection from her work, including the magnificent calico The Crucifixion of the Soul, contributed to the success of the 1979 exhibition ?Outsiders? at the Hayward Gallery. Madge Gill?s works are now preserved in several public collections, including the Collection de l?Art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Aracine Collection in Lille, France.

? Roger Cardinal 
ContributorsCreated : 2012-10-23 15:29:49 / From original database

Last Updated : 2012-10-23 15:46:22 /

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IDNameDOBPlace of birthArrivals & ShipsDest.AgencyFamily links
17737 EADES, Maud Ethel1882ENG, ESS, East Ham Aug 1896 : Scotsman CAN Barnardos