Frederick Gore

The canvas is unlined and undulates very slightly in the upper left corner. The weave of the canvas is thick and tiny scattered holes are visible across the paint surface. There is a tiny area of craquelure in the lower left corner. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals small spots of retouching to the upper and lower edges, and to a small are in the lower left corner. Held beneath glass in a wooden frame, and protected on the reverse by a sheet of perspex.
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Frederick Gore, son of Spencer Gore, studied at Trinity College and Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford in 1932-1934 and then at Westminster School of Art and the Slade between 1934-1937. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1937. He went on to teach at Westminster, Epsom and Chelsea Schools of Art and then joined St Martin's in 1946, where he became head of the painting department in 1951.

The present painting depicts Charlotte Street a year after the end of World War II. Fitzrovia became an artistic hub in the post war years with artists such as Matthew Smith and Adrian Heath working in studios in the area. A poster on the building in the left foreground entreats the public to 'Vote Labour' and another reads 'cut gas and electricity'. After forming a coalition with Churchill during the war, the Labour Party came to power in 1945 with a promise to fight the poverty and unemployment of 1930s Britain. Gore has chosen to include these political references into his scene of a central London street scene shortly after the war.
Gore's choice of Charlotte Street as his subject for an image of post-war London, damaged but not broken, cannot have been incidental. The area had been one of the hubs of artistic life in the capital since prior to World War I, probably as a result of the artisan nature of the area and its being home to many pubs and long-established restaurants such as Bertorelli's and La Tour d'Eiffel. The latter was of particular relevance to Gore as he painted a series of large scale murals for the first floor dining room in 1947-8 which were to remain in situ for over fifty years.