Signed on the canvas (to reverse on stretcher): S.F.Gore

Oil on canvas, 46 by 61 cm

Provenance: Anthony D'Offay; Mr and Mrs Alan Fortunoff, New York

Literature: Wendy Baron, The Camden Town Group, London, 1979, no.32, illustrated p.151

Gore was arguably the most significant figure in the Camden Town Group as well as being the leading force behind the foundation of both the Fitzroy Group and the Allied Artists’ Association. Indeed, despite his untimely death of pneumonia in 1914 aged only thirty five, Gore was at the heart of some of the most radical and forward-looking British art movements of the pre-First World War period. The present work was probably painted on a painting trip that Gore made to Brandsby Yorkshire in the summer of 1907 with fellow painters Albert Rutherston and Walter Russell. It is a fine example of a work that demonstrates the artist's newly-acquired divisionist painting technique (painting separately with small dots and strokes of colour). Wendy Baron refers to this technique on her entry on this painting in her book on the Camden Town Group (see literature above): “He began to build his pictures up constructively, using separate small touches of one colour at a time… His colours were often brilliant; orange, violets and greens are scattered in an ordered harmony that nonetheless retains a lively, even spontaneous flavour” (see literature, op cit, p.150). He had recently learned this method of painting from his fellow painter Lucien Pissarro.