The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Mary Johanna Gore, the artist’s widow; bought by an anonymous group of subscribers and presented to Tate Gallery 1920.

From a Window in Cambrian Road, Richmond is painted in artists’ oil paints on primed stretched canvas. The cloth appears to be linen and has a plain open weave. The support was supplied by the artists’ colourman George Rowney & Co. (now Daler-Rowney) and is a ‘Quality B’ grade canvas: ‘a good quality British Canvas with a light back’.1 The cloth has been sized and primed, probably with a lead white and oil-based priming.2 It is evenly applied and retains the canvas weave texture. The primed canvas is attached to a four-member stretcher with the steel tacks in their original positions.

The painting is at an early stage and it reveals part of Gore’s working process. The practices observed appear to be consistent with those detected in his other paintings in Tate’s collection. The stretched canvas is squared up with ruled graphite lines to form a 1½ inch grid (approximately). The grid is numbered from left to right along the top edge and from bottom to top along the right-hand edge. The outline of the design is drawn in pencil probably from a drawing. The drawn outlines are modified and reinforced with thinly brushed lines of diluted blue paint (see also Tate T02260). Colour is loosely laid into the outlines with a single or few simply modulated hues for each shape, leaving many gaps where the priming shows through. The paint is applied in a free and open manner with quarter-inch filbert hog bristle brushes or similar. Although at an early stage, painting is taken to a similar level of finish across the whole surface. There is a thin coating of varnish that evenly saturates the colours. The initial laying in defines the broad areas of colour, tone and warmth. It is confidently executed with few amendments, suggesting that Gore had accomplished this systemic technique. In a letter to James Bolivar Manson of 1935, the art critic Huntly Carter described how Gore arranged his ‘colours’ on a chart with written descriptions underneath (fig.1). Carter said he owned one of these charts and drew a sketch of it in the letter, but he did not include the list of ‘twenty-four colours’ or details of Gore’s annotations. Carter stated that he had taken advice from Robert Bevan who had implied that other artists associated with the Camden Town Group also used colour charts. The whereabouts of Gore’s chart or of the existence of any other chart is currently not known. It is unlikely that Gore used such a range of colours and the twenty-four colours referred to probably incorporated tonal variations of the same colour.

In the early summer of 1913 Spencer Gore, his wife Mollie and baby daughter Elizabeth moved from their flat in Houghton Place, Mornington Crescent, to 6 Cambrian Road, Richmond. Mollie was pregnant with their son Frederick, who was born in November 1913, and the move must have been precipitated by a need for more space and also a desire for a healthier environment, away from the smoky position of Houghton Place between the railways lines. At Cambrian Road the family had a whole house, in a pleasant road in a leafy, residential area of the town (fig.1). Another attraction must have been the proximity of Richmond Park, with access through the Cambrian Gate at the end of the street, barely 100 yards away.

At their new home, Gore immediately revived his practice of painting views from the front and back of the house. In From a Window in Cambrian Road, Richmond, Gore shows the view from a top-floor window at the rear. Many of the buildings visible were part of a hospital in Grove Road. The whole area has now been redeveloped and looks very different, but some of the buildings on the right, perhaps ward blocks, are still present. The bare branches of the trees in the foreground suggest that this must be a late autumn or early winter scene.

The paint is very thinly applied and the squaring-up shows through clearly, indicating the picture is not finished. A very similar composition, but with a slightly different view suggesting it was painted from another rear window, belonged to Gore’s friend Robert Bevan (private collection).1 This slightly smaller picture has a more subdued palette to the Tate work, and the paint is more thickly and richly applied. It may have been that Gore was intending to return to the Tate painting to complete it. However, the picture shows evidence of Gore continuing the modernist approach he had developed at Letchworth, stylising forms and using areas of flat colour (see Tate T01859). Indeed, the whole scene is ‘flattened’ out; there is no attempt to create an impression of recession and this is apparently a quite deliberate action, rather than a symptom of its incomplete state. Two studies for the painting survive: a graphite and blue pencil drawing on wove paper that has been torn carefully into three pieces (two pieces shown in fig.2),2 and a squared-up and numbered graphite and blue pencil drawing on wove paper of the whole composition on a single sheet, from which the oil must have been transferred (fig.3). Gore’s normal procedure when making a painting was either to stand in front of his subject and paint direct, or else to make careful drawings and then execute the oil in his studio, as in the present case.

When Gore died, his friend Wyndham Lewis used From a Window in Cambrian Road, Richmond to illustrate his obituary in Blast.3 This may seem a somewhat unusual choice, as it was unfinished. Lewis may have chosen it because he felt it was so technically advanced or possibly because it was the last picture Gore was working on before his death. For the art historian David Peters Corbett, however, this work is entirely appropriate within the pages of Blast. Like the vorticist works therein, it is a ‘schematic image and summation which aims to encompass, from some intellectual point of vantage poised above the mêlée of contemporary life, its characteristic forms and meanings’.4

The picture was presented to Tate by an anonymous group of subscribers in 1920, of whom there is no record left among the Tate’s archives. However, it seems likely that they numbered Gore’s close friends. Following Gore’s death, Walter Sickert wrote to Nan Hudson:

Similarly, Harold Gilman wrote to Lucien Pissarro’s wife Esther:

Sickert reported in a letter to Ethel Sands: ‘We have already £180 for the purchase of a picture by Gore & the circulars only go out today!’7 It is likely that the donors of the Tate picture were the group Sickert listed, as no other work by Gore was presented to a public institution around this time. Why they delayed six years is difficult to explain, but may have been due to the uncertainties of the First World War. What is evident from the sum of £180 that Sickert mentions was that the amount spent on it was considerably higher than the prices Gore’s work usually fetched, and that this was, as Gilman indicated, partly a way of raising money for Gore’s family. As an unfinished painting it seems an unusual choice to represent Gore in a public collection. This might strengthen the idea that he was still working on it at his death, rather than having abandoned it.