Spencer Gore (artist)

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Spencer Frederick Gore (1878-1914) was a British painter who was first president of the Camden Town Group. Influenced by Post-Impressionists, he experimented with colour in his works. He died aged thirty six, from pneumonia.

Gore, Spencer (1878-1914) was perhaps the strongest and most original of the younger painters in the CAMDEN TOWN GROUP. He was trained at the SLADE 1896-9, overlapping with Wyndham LEWIS with whom he visited Spain in 1902. His meeting with SICKERT in Dieppe in 1904 was momentous. Many of his paintings of c. 1907-10 are in a technique derived from Pointillism (learned from his friend PISSARRO). His subject-matter included landscapes, portraits, figures in interiors like Sickert’s only prettier, and music hall and theatrical performers and audiences. From 1911-12 onwards his densely textured, strongly articulated window views in Camden Town to flat, Gauguinesque syntheses of shaped, such as The Stafford Gallery (priv. Coll.) which shows a 1911 exhibition with Gauguin paintings. In 1912 he directed a scheme for mural decorations in the nightclub “The Cave of the Golden Calf”. And a surviving design suggests affinities with early Kandinsky. Later that year he contributed to Roger FRY’s second Post-Impressionist exhibition. His last landscapes are quieter in effect but strongly structured, suggesting a new influence from Cezanne. He died prematurely, from pneumonia. • Baron (1979); Spencer Gore (exh., London, Anthony d’Offay, 1983) From: The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of British Art – General Editor: David Bindman – 1985

Gore, Spencer (1878-1914). British painter of landscapes, music-hall scenes, interiors and occasional still lifes. He was the son of Spencer Walter Gore, who won the first Wimbledon tennis championship in 1877, and nephew of Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford. In 1896-9 he studied at Slade School, where he was a particular friend of Harold Gilman. In 1904 he visited Sickert in Dieppe; this marked the beginning of his close acquaintance with recent French painting (he returned to France in 1905 and 1906), and his enthusiasm helped to decide Sickert to return to Britain. For the rest of his short career Gore was part of Sickert’s circle, becoming a founder member successively of the “Allied Artists’ Association in 1908. The Camden Town Group (of which he was first President) in 1911, and the London Group in 1913. His early work was Impressionist in style, but he was strongly influenced by Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions (Gore’s own work was included in the second in 1912) and his later pictures show vivid use of flat, bright colour and boldly simplified forms. He died of pneumonia aged 35 and was much lamented by his many friends in the art world. Sickert said Gore was ‘probably the man I love and admire most of any I have known’, and his obituary in the Morning Post remarked that ‘his personal character was so exceptional as to give him a unique influence in the artistic affairs of London in the last dozen years.’ His son Frederick Gore (1913 -) is also a painter. From: Oxford concise dictionary of Art & Artists – Ian Chilvers – Second Edition 1996