While the majority of Gaul’s career was devoted to western and wartime subjects, his genre and figure paintings from the 1870s and early 1880s show the influence of his early teacher John George Brown. Girl with Flowers was likely done during this period and reflects a common theme among genre painters in post-Civil War America, when the sentimental portraits of children by Brown and another famous genre painter, Winslow Homer, conveyed a return to innocence lost during the tumultuous war years. Although the expression of Gaul’s young subject is tinged with sadness, the bright-colored roses in the foreground, captured in full bloom under gleaming light, offer a sense of hope and promise.

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Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, William Gilbert Gaul’s hopes to pursue a military career were deferred by illness, and thus he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in the early 1870s under the instruction of Lemuel Wilmarth. He also studied privately with genre painter John George Brown, whose charming pictures of street urchins and bootblacks would come to inspire Gaul’s early professional work. Gaul first exhibited with the National Academy in 1875 and became an Associate member four years later. In 1882, he was awarded full Academician status, becoming the youngest to achieve the honor in the association’s history. Gaul continued to take part in the Academy’s annual exhibitions for all but six years from 1877 to 1919. 

Provenance:

Private collection

Wedding gift to the current owner’s parents, 1938

By descent to private collection, Fryeburg, Maine, until 2024

By gift to private collection, Falmouth, Maine, as of 2024