16 Facts About Margaret Gillies

Margaret Gillies was a London-born Scottish miniaturist and watercolourist.

Mary Gillies became an author, while Margaret took the direction of a professional artist.

Margaret Gillies received lessons in miniature-painting from Frederick Cruikshank, and gained a reputation for it.

Smith and Margaret Gillies lived together at Hillside, Fitzroy Park, Highgate from 1844.

Smith, an ordained Unitarian minister, and Margaret Gillies associated with the group around the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical; Mary Margaret Gillies was involved in editing it from 1836.

Margaret Gillies illustrated in 1842 Smith's first report as a mines inspector, on a tour in Leicestershire and West Yorkshire.

Around 1850 Margaret Gillies' studio was at 36 Percy Street, where she briefly gave a home to the "auto-icon" of Jeremy Bentham, on whose cadaver Southwood Smith had conducted a highly controversial public dissection in 1832.

Margaret Gillies went in 1851 to Paris for a year, where she worked in the studios of Hendrik and Ary Scheffer, and on her return to England she exhibited some portraits in oils.

Margaret Gillies then concentrated on watercolour painting, typically choosing domestic, romantic, or sentimental subjects, for which she was best known.

Margaret Gillies joined the Society of Female Artists in 1856.

In 1854, short of money, they had moved to The Pines, near Weybridge, but Margaret Gillies kept a studio in 6 Southampton Street, off Fitzroy Square, later renumbered 27 Conway Street.

Mary died in 1870 and early in 1887 Margaret Gillies moved to The Warren, Crockham Hill, Kent, where she died later that year, on 20 July, of pleurisy, after a few days' illness.

In 1866 Margaret Gillies bought a grave plot in the dissenters' section of the western side of Highgate Cemetery for a stillborn baby of Charles and Gertrude Lewes.

Margaret Gillies's subjects included feminist figures: Mary Leman Grimstone, Mary Howitt and her daughter Anna Mary Howitt, Harriet Martineau of the Monthly Repository group.

Margaret Gillies painted the poet and critic Richard Hengist Horne and the novelist Anne Marsh-Caldwell.

In 1852 Margaret Gillies was elected an associate of the Old Society of Painters in Water Colours, and was a contributor to its exhibitions for the rest of her life.