Object Details

From:NHerts

Name/Title‘Letchworth, The Road’, oil painting

About this objectOil painting, Letchworth, The Road by Spencer Gore. Road, apparently Wilbury Road looking east toward Standalone Farm and the valley of Pix Brook, with figure, from foreground to distance. Two or three typical Garden City houses to right with prominent red roofs. Fields and line of trees in distance. Stylised sky in shades of blue, white & violet. Gore, an important artist, painted some of his more modern works during his short stay in Letchworth Garden City.

During the first Coronavirus lockdown of 2020 North Hertfordshire Museum Visitor Services Assistant Nicola Viinikka researched and gave her opinion on this object.

What is the most interesting thing about this object?
That this is a complete contrast to his work with the Camden Group, which focused on urban life. The colours are more reminiscent of a Howard Hodgkin.

The North Hertfordshire connection
Spencer Gore only spent a period of four months in Letchworth, staying at Harold Gilman’s house at 100 Wilbury Road, from August – November 1912. However, he obviously took great inspiration from this new garden city – which had attracted so many from the arts and crafts movement – as it was one of the most productive periods of his life. He completed 23 paintings during this time including The Beanfield, a rural landscape, considered one of his most technically innovative and modern works.

When he died of pneumonia two years later in 1914 aged 35, he had made a significant impact and left a lasting legacy.

To many, Spencer Frederick Gore is best known as a founder member, with Walter Sickert, of the Camden Town Group. He was its first president and may have held the first position of the London Group too if he had not proposed Harold Gilman; Gore became the treasurer instead. He organised the Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others in Brighton in 1913, which marked the division between post-impressionism and what was to become vorticism.(1)

Gore was born on 26 May 1878 in Epsom in Surrey, the fourth child of Spencer William Gore (winner of the first Lawn Tennis Championship at Wimbledon in 1877) and Amy Gore (née Smith, William’s senior business partner’s daughter). He attended Harrow School from 1892 to 1896 where he discovered his love of art, winning the first Yates Thompson Prize for drawing. He also inherited his father’s sporting abilities, excelling in cricket while at school.

Enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1896 to 1899, Gore’s contemporaries included Harold Gilman, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis , William Orpen and Albert Rutherston, with many of whom he made lasting friendships.

The importance of the Camden Group
Named after the area of north London in which the artists Walter Sickert and Spencer Gore lived and painted, the Camden Group of artists, which evolved from the 1907 Fitzroy Street Group, was a short-lived exhibiting society of artists which has become synonymous with a distinctive type of painting in the period just before the First World War. They held just three exhibitions, all at the Carfax Gallery, London, in 1911 and 1912, before dissolving in 1913.

Their aim was to produce small-scale, affordable pictures, with realistic depictions of Edwardian urban life, as lived by middle and working-class Londoners. Gradually, this also encompassed the increasing mobility brought about by the railways, which facilitated travel to areas outside London.

Following the deaths of Gore in 1914 and Gilman in 1919, with the events of the First World War in between, the significance and fundamental principles of Camden Town Group painting might have been forgotten. However, there continued to be strong commercial interest in their paintings throughout the 1930s, when many still appreciated their realist approach.

1. The vorticists were a British avant-garde group founded in London in 1914 by the artist Wyndham Lewis. Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. Their history was short-lived due to the outbreak of WWI, although Lewis attempted to revive the ideas in 1920 with Group X.

MakerSpencer Frederick Gore

Maker RoleArtist

Date Made1912

Period20th Century (1901-2000)

Medium and MaterialsOils on canvas

Place MadeUnited Kingdom, England, Hertfordshire, Letchworth Garden City

Inscription and MarksSignature, bottom right: S.F.Gore

Measurements406 × 435 mm

Named CollectionLetchworth Museum

Object TypePainting

Object number1983.91

Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved