London, Friday Club, February 1914 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no.6);
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Mark Gertler, 1949 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 16);
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery and toured to Colchester, The Minories, London, Morley College Gallery and Ashmolean Museum, Mark Gertler, 1971 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 14);
London, Camden Art Centre and toured to Nottingham Castle Museum and Leeds City Art Gallery, Mark Gertler: Paintings and Drawings, 1992 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 24, pl. 48, p. 61);
Woking, The Lightbox, Ways of Seeing, 15 January – 13 March 2011;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Dreams and Nightmares, 22 May – 15 July 2012;
Chichester, Otter Gallery, University of Chichester, Circles of Influence: British Art 1915-50 – A Diarist’s Perspective, 6 February – 19 April 2016
Literature:
John Woodeson, Mark Gertler, Biography of a Painter 1891-1939, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1972 (illustrated, p. 136, 344, 363, pl. 43)
In 1908 Mark Gertler entered the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer. Essentially a realist, his work over the next decade showed his dissatisfaction with English Post-Impressionism. He sought to bring to his paintings a strength and purpose, exemplified by bold, almost harsh colours and simple compositions. Although an inanimate object, the direct gaze of the wooden toy has an unnerving effect. The doll in the picture is a Dutch Doll, also the subject of a painting executed in 1926, in the collection of the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove.
