Kate Gilbert

Kate was born Kate Elizabeth Ellen Gilbert-Williams on 17 December 1843 in London, being the only child of the well-known Victorian landscape painter Arthur Gilbert and his first wife Elizabeth Williams.

Her younger step-brother Horace Walter Gilbert was an artist as well, but he ultimately chose a different career and became a civil servant instead.

Many of her works date from the late 1880s and the 1890s when she lived with these mentors, no doubt receiving encouragement from them both.

She would have also shared the latter household with her cousin Caroline Fanny Williams, the daughter of her uncle, and an accomplished painter as well.

When Kate's uncle died, she and Caroline parted company, and she ran a boarding house for a time, before retiring to Sutton, Surrey, where she died on 15 April 1916 at an address on Collingwood Road.