Spencer Frederick Gore
1878-1914
Born in Epsom, he was educated at Harrow and then at the Slade School of Art. He travelled widely, visiting Madrid to study the Spanish masters with Wyndham Lewis in 1902. In 1904 and 1905 he visited France where he saw the Gauguin exhibition at the Salon d'Automne, an event which made a lasting impression on him. He began exhibiting with the New English Art Club and was elected a member in 1909. A close associate of Sickert, having met him in Dieppe in 1904, he was elected President of the Camden Town Group in 1910. In 1912 he was represented in Roger Fry's Second Post-Impressionist exhibition staged at the Grafton Galleries. Gore was largely responsible for the organization of the Camden Town Group and Others exhibition staged in 1913 in Brighton and he, perhaps more than any other individual, was responsible for bringing all the modernist factions under one roof in the form of the London Group. Although a key figure in the formation of the London Group, he only lived long enough to exhibit at the first exhibition in March 1914. Whilst his early work was influenced by the French Impressionists, Pissarro in particular, his later work was charaterised by strong design as in his paintings of Richmond Park. These later works owed much to Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists. The critic Frank Rutter noted, 'his joy in the loveliness of colour never deserted him.' Writing soon after Gore's premature death in 1914, Sickert stated: 'To come down to historical fact, I may as well say that it is my practice that was transformed from 1905 by the example of the development of Gore's talent.' The Anthony D'Offay Gallery staged a major exhibition of Gore's work in 1983.
Works Available
Interior with Woman in White, Granby Street