Spencer Frederick Gore

Thomas Agnew & Sons, London
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, where acquired by the previous owner
Their sale, Christie's London, 16th November 2011, lot 41, where acquired by the present owner

London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by Spencer F. Gore, April 1928, cat. no.47.

Harold Gilman, Notebook, no.209a (as Interior of Cambrian Road, Richmond with MG Sewing at Table).

Original canvas. There are extremely minor traces of light craquelure to a spot in the top centre, and to the lower left green/grey carpet area, only visible upon extremely close inspection. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals an area of flourescene and retouching to the pale blue pigment to the left of the sitter, with further traces of fluorescence and probable retouchings appearing to the extreme edge in the top right quadrant, and a horizontal line to the centre of the bottom edge. These have been executed in a very sensitive manner. Housed in a thick gilt wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘You know my admiration for his talent and for his splendid heart and head. He is probably the man I love and admire most of any I have known’ (Walter Sickert discussing Gore in a letter to Ethel Sands, 24^th March 1914, quoted in Wendy Baron, Miss Ethel Sands and Her Circle, London, 1977, p.125).

In January 1912 Gore married Mary Johanna Kerr, known affectionately as Mollie, and the pair moved from his bachelor lodgings at 6 Mornington Crescent to nearby 2 Houghton Place, where he was still in close reach of Sickert’s studio. At Houghton Place he continued to devote himself to his interior works and window-height viewpoints, and developed further his soft and subtle palette of gently muted colours. In the summer of the following year the couple moved south of the river to Richmond, taking residence at 6 Cambrian Road, a residence which was to last less than a year and brought to an abrupt close by the artist’s untimely death in March 1914. Whilst out early in the winter morning in Richmond Park, sketching in preparation for his series of park landscapes, he caught a cold, which soon developed into pneumonia and eventually took his life, aged only 35.

The present work is an exceptionally rare example within the artist’s small oeuvre, and as one of only thirty paintings of Richmond subjects, it is the only known interior scene painted during his time there, and the fifth to last work finished during his lifetime. The scene depicts Mollie seated at her sewing table in a brightly-lit and vividly coloured room, perhaps indicating the beginnings of a new and slightly more colourful departure in terms of the artist’s palette, and a possible anticipation of his contemporary Harold Gilman’s Maple Street interiors. With richly patterned wallpaper, reminiscent of the interiors of the Nabi painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, whom his close friend Sickert knew and exhibited with in Paris in the early years of the 20^th Century, Gore displays at once his interest and awareness of artistic developments of the continent. In 1912 he was one of a small handful of British artists included in Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, alongside the likes of Eric Gill, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and a young Stanley Spencer. Here he exhibited alongside heavyweights of the European scene, including Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Henri Matisse, and became exposed to a richly varied palette that no doubt went on to influence his later work. In a room dedicated to the work of Matisse, Gore saw The Red Studio (1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York), an interior abounding with a colourful, kinetic energy that is well reflected in the present work. Of a slightly more toned-down palette than Matisse’s masterpiece, Interior of Room at 6 Cambrian Road, Richmond hosts a varied range of gentle mint greens, soft light blues and lilacs, all swathed in a bright warm glow. There is a warmth to the domestic familiarity of the composition, and a skill of execution that reflects all the confidence and optimism of an artist at the very peak of his career.