Madge Gill

Madge Gill was born Maud Ethel Eades in 1882 in Walthamstow, in London's East End; the exact day of her birth is not consistently documented across sources. She had no formal art training. Following her marriage to Thomas Gill in 1907, she began working under the name Madge Gill, and after a period of serious personal loss and illness she started to draw compulsively, attributing the work to a spirit guide she called Myrninerest and often signing pieces with that name rather than her own.

Her calico drawing Reincarnation, roughly five meters long, was her first publicly shown work, included in the 1932 East End Academy exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, where it drew favorable press notice, including in The Times. Gill became a regular participant in the East End Academy exhibitions from 1932 to 1947, and later accounts describe coverage of her work in the occult magazine Prediction in 1937. She worked largely at home, often through the night, producing an enormous body of drawings, postcards, and embroidered textiles that she rarely sold, reportedly believing the works were not entirely hers to sell.

Gill died on 28 January 1961 in Leytonstone, London, at the age of 79 (one source gives 18 January 1961 as the death date; this profile follows the date used by the majority of English-language sources). After her death, decades of accumulated work were discovered in her home and passed into the care of Newham Council, forming the basis of the Newham Heritage and Archive collection that still anchors scholarship on her practice today.

Recognition for Gill has come less through conventional prizes than through sustained institutional validation. Press coverage during her lifetime, including in The Times in 1932 and the occult magazine Prediction in 1937, noted her work and her reputation as a spiritualist practitioner in London. Later scholarship, including work published in Women's History Review, has emphasized that she produced her enormous body of work entirely outside mainstream art institutions and training, which is central to her classification as an art brut and outsider figure. That standing has been reinforced by acquisitions and exhibitions at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and, most recently, by her inclusion in Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Gill's market has strengthened markedly in recent years as institutional attention has grown. Her auction record is an untitled embroidered textile that sold for USD 120,650 at Christie's New York on 26 February 2026, which the house recorded as a new record for the artist. It surpassed her previous high, Untitled (Venus Amid Heaven), which sold for USD 78,100 at Christie's on 1 March 2024, a rise of roughly 54 percent in under two years. She is currently presented by The Gallery of Everything in London. Because so much of her output stayed in family or municipal hands rather than moving through dealers, the number of major works that have ever reached auction remains small relative to her institutional standing.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Madge Gill, and her working habits mean many pieces are untitled, undated, and were never intended for sale, which places significant weight on provenance drawn from the Newham Heritage and Archive collection and from the Gallery of Everything. Auction supply is thin, so recent record prices reflect a small number of closely watched sales rather than a broad, liquid market; collectors should treat any single result as a data point tied to a specific, often rare work rather than a stable trend line. Works signed "Myrninerest" or "Myrninnerest" are catalogued as works by Madge Gill, not by a separate artist.