11 February - 1 November 2020
In 2020 we put the spotlight back on local artist Madeline Green.
A modernist figurative artist, Madeline Green grew up and lived most of her life in Ealing – where she helped to found the Ealing Art Guild, known today as the Ealing Art Group. From 1906 she studied at the prestigious drawing and painting schools at the Royal Academy of Arts, at a time when John Singer Sargent, John William Waterhouse and George Clausen were visiting teachers, and where she twice won awards for her exceptionally life-like sketches.
A versatile artist across 2D media, Green was well received by contemporaries, exhibiting at 18 galleries across the UK, Dublin, Venice and Paris, including 24 times at the Royal Academy.
Madeline Green
A self-portrait, Green is wearing an artist’s smock and holding a bunch of tulips as she faces the viewer. This popular painting was featured in many exhibitions: at the Royal Academy (1914), Walker Gallery Liverpool (1916) Society of Women Artists (1924) and at the Paris Salon (1927).
Madeline Green
In several of Green’s paintings she depicts herself as a costermonger (a fruit and vegetable seller), as she has here (the young woman may be Gladys, or Madeline again). Before the arrival of heavy industry, Ealing was surrounded by farmland and costermongers would have been a regular sight. Green regularly experimented with representations of gender through clothing and poses in her paintings.
