Spencer Frederick Gore

R.A. Harari
Spiller Gallery, London
Anthony d'Offay, London, where acquired by Simon Sainsbury
His sale, Christie's London, 18th June 2008, lot 107, where acquired by the present owner

Possibly Carfax Gallery, London, Paintings by the late Spencer F Gore, 1916 (details untraced);
London, Anthony d'Offay, Spencer Frederick Gore, February - March 1983, cat. no.16, illustrated twice.

Wendy Baron, The Camden Town Group, Scolar Press, London, 1979, cat. no.27, pp.142-3, illustrated (as View from a Window and dated circa 1908-9).

Original canvas. There are some very minor frame abrasions just visible to the extreme edge. There is fine craquelure visible throughout the composition, but this excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals traces of fluorescence and probable retouchings to the extreme edges and some further isolated spots appearing to the sky in the top quarter of the composition. These have all been executed in a very sympathetic manner. Housed in a thick, gilt silvered frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Following his studies at the Slade, London, alongside contemporaries including Harold Gilman, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis and William Orpen, Gore formed a close relationship with Walter Sickert, whom he had first met in Dieppe in 1904, and together they formed the nucleus of the Fitzroy Street Group. Like Sickert who in 1905 moved to 8 Fitzroy Street, Gore was fascinated by his Camden Town surroundings and the opportunities presented in terms of pictorial subject matter. Renting a studio space along the road from Sickert at 21 Fitzroy Street, the pair sketched together at the nearby Bedford Music Hall in Camden. Sickert encouraged Gore, eighteen years his junior, to paint in his studio, rather than en plein air, a move which was to have a profound impact over the development of his style.

The present work, executed in 1911, the year before his wedding (with Sickert acting as best man), was painted from the third floor of Sickert’s school, Rowlandson House, and shows the intersection of Hampstead Road and Rutland Street in Camden. Looking towards the continent, and in particular the work of Henri Matisse, who was later to exhibit with Gore at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1912, Gore became fascinated with the window motif as a means by which to depict both an interior and exterior setting. We see this subject matter emerging in Matisse’s The Open Window, Collioure (1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington), and closer to home with Sickert’s La Seine du Balcon (1906, Private Collection), but in the present composition Gore pulls back to include the cross bars of the window pane, a motif hinted towards in earlier compositions, such as View From A Window (1909, Southampton City Art Gallery) and The Flowered Hat or Women Who Waits (c.1907, Plymouth City Art Gallery), but one which was to fascinate the artist even further from this period onwards. With a richly varied palette the eye is drawn up from the green grass of the lower right quadrant, to the maid hard at work scrubbing the steps of the doctor’s surgery, marked by the brass plate fixed to the railings, and later recalled with warm familiarity by the artist’s widow. The present work is one of at least three known versions of the composition, including the largest of which was previously owned by the artist Edward Le Bas, and showcases Gore’s meticulous brushwork and compositional awareness.