Gilbert married Lucy Squire (1808–1862) at St Anne’s, Soho, on 7th August 1827 and they had six children, four sons and two daughters. The eldest, Charles, was born in Chelsea on 26th August 1828 and baptised Roman Catholic (as Charles Joseph) at Lymington on 22nd February 1831 with his sister, Lucy Matilda, who was born there on 22nd January. The next two boys, Thomas and William Aloysius, b.1833 and 1836, were also baptised Catholic there (Catholic Record Society, Miscellanea IX, pp.305–06, Registers of Pylewell House, Lymington). Baptisms for Mary Cecilia (b.1838) and Francis Berkley (b.1845) are untraced as are further details on all except Charles and Thomas. The former later called himself Joseph Charles, became a sea captain and died in South Africa in 1912; Thomas was a Customs officer and died at Gravesend in 1911.

It therefore appears their father became a Catholic convert. More significantly, the recorded godfathers of Charles, Lucy and Thomas were members of the Catholic Weld family of Lulworth Castle, Dorset, and the Pylewell estate, Lymington, of whom the celebrated yachtsman, Joseph Weld (1777–1863) was then secular head. (His elder brother, Thomas, d.1837, was the first English Catholic cardinal since the seventeenth century.) Local Catholic baptisms, including the Gilberts’, took place at Pylewell House.

Given the few works Gilbert showed in London and that the only oil in a British public collection is of Weld’s most famous yacht, ‘Alarm’, winning her first race at Cowes in 1830 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich), this suggests the possible circles of his patronage, though family tradition reports him a perfectionist who destroyed work with which he was unsatisfied (see James Taylor, Yachts on Canvas, 1998, and repr. 2006, p.75). Weld was certainly a patron, since ledger payment entries between 1831 and 1845, and an 1853 Gilbert letter concerning another, survive in Weld papers in the Dorset Records Centre: the pictures are not identified. Weld sold the Pylewell estate in 1853 and Lulworth Castle was gutted by fire in 1929, so paintings he owned may have been lost.

In 1832 Gilbert published Views of the principal Seats, and Marine and Landscape Scenery in the vicinity of Lymington, Hants, from original Pictures taken on the spot by J. M. Gilbert, Marine Painter: these appeared in parts, lithographed by Louis Haghe, and originally co-published by R. A. Grove (d.1849) in Lymington, although subsequently reissued by others in 1838. In 1846 Queen Victoria headed the list of subscribers to The Experimental Squadron: a series of drawings on stone by L. Haghe, from paintings by J.M. Gilbert illustrative of H.M. visit to Spithead, July 15, 1845, also co-published by Grove, and purchased one of the oil paintings on which these were based (Royal Collection). Haghe was Lithographer to the Queen and the title page also shows that by 1845 Gilbert was ‘Marine Painter to the Royal Southern Yacht Club’. This work also saw a rapid second edition in 1846.

By 1833 Gilbert and his family were living in Boldre, Lymington, probably at 2 Holly Cottage. His wife died there on 14th December 1862 and he followed on 18th April 1876. They do not appear in the 1841 census but in that for 1851, and the Catholic baptismal records, he appears only as ‘Miles Gilbert’. This may have been the name he favoured (though his prints and the RA and BI lists use the initials ‘J. M.’), perhaps in part to avoid confusion with other artists of similar name, such as Joseph Francis Gilbert of Chichester (d.1856). Another Boldre resident, General William Gilbert (1782–1866) of the Bombay Infantry, is sometimes wrongly said to have been his elder brother: he was in fact his uncle (his father’s younger half-brother).

Pieter van der Merwe: updated August 2022, including information kindly supplied by Ian Dear. See also his article ‘Fake or Fortune? In search of a little-known marine artist’, in Journal of the Association of Yachting Historians, Winter 2018, pp.4–5.