page_title: Mark Gertler (artist)
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Gertler (artist) / Career
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Stearns ('T.S.') Eliot; Mark Gertler; Lady Ottoline Morrell, by Lady Ottoline Morrell (died 1938). See source website for additional information.
context_page_description: Mark Gertler, born Marks Gertler, was a British painter of figure subjects, portraits and still-life.
  His early life and his relationship with Dora Carrington were the inspiration for Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel. The characters of Loerke in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Gombauld in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow were based on him.
context_section_description: Gertler's patron was Lady Ottoline Morrell, through whom he became acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group. She introduced him to Walter Sickert, the nominal leader of the Camden Town Group. Gertler was soon enjoying success as a painter of society portraits, but his temperamental manner and devotion to advancing his work according to his own vision led to increasing personal frustration and the alienation of potential sitters and buyers. As a result, he struggled frequently with poverty.
  In 1914 the polymath art collector Edward Marsh became Gertler's patron. The relationship between the two men proved a difficult one, as Gertler felt that the system of patronage and the circle in which he moved were in direct conflict with his sense of self. In 1916, as World War I dragged on, Gertler ended the relationship due to his pacifism and conscientious objection (Marsh was secretary to Winston Churchill and patron to some of the war poets). Gertler's major painting, Merry-Go-Round, was created in the midst of the war years and was described by Lawrence as "the best modern picture I have seen".
  In 1913 Gertler met the author and poet Gilbert Cannan, who later described him as "a small passionate man with green eyes". Cannan subsequently invited Mark to stay with him and his wife Mary at their Mill House in Cholesbury and the two men became good friends. Gertler lived there on and off during 1915–16, and painted Gilbert Cannan at his Mill (now on view in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford). The picture depicts Cannan outside the Mill with his two dogs. The black and white one, Luath, had been the inspiration for the dog Nana in the stage production of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. It was Cannan who was responsible for introducing Lady Ottoline Morrell to Gertler's paintings and encouraging her to support his work. Cannan closely based the young Jewish character of his 1916 novel Mendel on Gertler's early life including his infatuation and affair with fellow artist Dora Carrington. This relationship remained unfulfilled as Carrington spurned his numerous advances and instead declared her love for Lytton Strachey. The friendship of Cannan and Gertler waned after 1916, largely because of Cannan's increasingly unstable behaviour.
  Virginia Woolf recorded her impressions of Gertler after he came to visit her and her husband in Sussex in September 1918. As he left they cried, 
  "Good God, what an egoist!" We have been talking about Gertler to Gertler for some 30 hours; it is like putting a microscope to your eye. One molehill is wonderfully clear; the surrounding world ceases to exist. But he is a forcible young man; if limited, able & respectable within those limits; as hard as a cricket ball; & as tightly rounded & stuffed in at the edges. We discussed—well, it always came back to Gertler. "I have a very peculiar character ... I am not like any other artist ... My picture would not have those blank spaces ... I don't see that, because in my case I have a sense which other people don’t have ... I saw in a moment what she had never dreamt of seeing ..." & so on. And if you do slip a little away, he watches very jealously, from his own point of view, & somehow tricks you back again. He hoards an insatiable vanity. I suspect the truth to be that he is very anxious for the good opinion of people like ourselves, & would immensely like to be thought well of by Duncan [Grant], Vanessa [Bell] & Roger [Fry]. His triumphs have been too cheap so far. However this is honestly outspoken, & as I say, he has power & intelligence, & will, one sees, paint good interesting pictures, though some rupture of the brain would have to take place before he could be a painter.
  Gertler's later works developed a sometimes very harsh edge, influenced by his increasing ill health. In 1920 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which forced him to enter a sanatorium on a number of occasions during the twenties and thirties. Two of Gertler's close friends, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, succumbed to the disease.
  In 1930 Gertler married Marjorie Greatorex Hodgkinson, which
caption: Mark Gertler with T. S. Eliot (left) and his patron Lady Ottoline Morrell
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