Madge Gill (1882–1961), born Maude Ethel Eades, was an English outsider and visionary artist. Early years Born 19 January 1882, an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, (now Greater London), she spent much of her early years in seclusion because her family couldn't stand the embarrassment. At age 9, despite her mother still being alive, she was placed in Dr. Barnardo’s Girls’ Village Home orphanage at Barkingside, Ilford, Essex. In 1896, she was sent to Canada by Dr. Barnardo's Homes as a British Home Child, arriving aboard the S.S. Scotsman as one of a group of 254 children destined to become farm laborers and domestic servants for Canadian families. Upon arrival at Quebec City, she and the other girls in her travel party were taken by train to Barnardo’s Hazelbrae Home in Peterborough, Ontario before being sent out on placements as domestics. Her name, Maud Eades, can be found inscribed on the “Additions and Corrections” side panel installed on the Hazelbrae Barnardo Home Memorial in Peterborough in 2019. After spending her teenage years working as a domestic servant and caregiver for young children on a series of Ontario farms, she managed to move back to East Ham in 1900 to live with her aunt, who introduced her to Spiritualism and astrology. During that time, she found work as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital, in Leytonstone. At the age of 25, she married her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. Together they had three sons; their second son Reginald, died of the Spanish flu. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl and almost died herself, contracting a serious illness that left her bedridden for several months and blind in her left eye. Artistic works During her illness, in 1920, Gill – now thirty-eight – took a sudden and passionate interest in drawing, creating thousands of allegedly mediumistic works over the following 40 years, most done with ink in black and white. The works came in all sizes, from postcard-sized to huge sheets of fabric, some over long. She claimed to be guided by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest) and often signed her works in this name. As American scholar Daniel Wojcik noted, "like other Spiritualists, Gill did not attribute her art to her own abilities, but considered herself to be a physical vessel through which the spirit world could be expressed." However, she