The artist’s Modernist masterpiece, this painting holds many secrets. The painter Gillies is shown in a mirror, but his position in it means what we see is impossible. In the mould of Velasquez’s Las Meninas, it is an illusion of family realities and identities in time and space. The interior here is not just the interior of a house, but also the interior of the artist’s mind.
If you look at the right side of the painting, you can see a cut in the canvas. It has been suggested that Gillies cut it down and later
reattached it, but the related drawing in the display case suggests he may have instead extended a canvas to create space for the family triptych.