Spencer Gore was born Epsom, Surrey. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, before making several visit to France where he stayed with the painter, Walter Sickert. The two painters would work separately by day and meet in the evenings to discuss their work and their ideas for English art; Gore’s quite personal assimilation of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism was to be reflected in his original use of colour. In 1905 he joined the Fitzroy Street circle of painters and under Sickert’s encouragement painted a series of London theatre interiors, characterised by increasingly strong contrasts of colour.

Despite a tendency to decorativeness, Gore’s painting retained an emphatic sense of design, due in part to his habit of working from small, well documented drawings. Many of Gore’s paintings during this period reflect his residence in and around Mornington Crescent (one of Camden Town’s principal thoroughfares), its gardens and street façades. In 1911 he became a founder member of the Camden Town Group. His landscape paintings of Hertfordshire and Richmond where he moved in 1913 became increasingly boldly designed and flattened. On 25 March 1914 while out painting he was caught in a storm and contracted pneumonia. Sadly, by 27 March, Gore, aged thirty five, was dead.

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.