In her catalog foreword for Madge Oliver's 1935 memorial exhibition at J. Leger & Son's Gallery, London, Ethel Walker considered her 'a great painter' and described what she had admired in Oliver's work: a 'free handling of paint, and a breadth of design in her compositions'.
The memorial exhibition gathered together interiors, still lifes and landscapes painted in France, where Oliver had settled. She had trained at the Slade, where she was awarded a Slade scholarship in 1896-7. A glimpse of a Miss Oliver, who may well be Madge Oliver, joining in a student debate at University College in the late 1890s, survives. The student Gazette reported that, countering a motion that 'the world was degenerating', Miss Oliver had argued that, on the contrary, progress was being made, because women could now become students and travel around London. If this was indeed Madge Oliver, her later journeys around Europe and eventual choice of Cassis in the South of France as her home suggest that she was making the most of the recently won freedoms for New Women at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Oliver's painting of the corner of her studio links her work to that of another ex-Slade student working in France at the time, Gwen John. The two women also portrayed nuns. Both women share the common influence of a branch of contemporary French painting, the Intimiste work of Bonnard and Vuillard. Oliver, unlike John, had a solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Druet in 1920.
She died four years later while visiting Corsica. |
