Signed and dated: Charles Ginner/ 28.VII.1912 

Pen and ink, pencil and coloured crayon, 10 by 14.5 cm

This recently re-discovered drawing is a very rare surviving study for the avant-garde mural scheme created for the Cave of the Golden Calf, a short-lived nightclub that opened near Regent Street in 1912, closing only two years later at the outbreak of war in 1914. The club was owned by Frida Strindberg, a wealthy Austrian and the second wife of the Swedish playwright Augustus Strindberg. A keen supporter of contemporary art, she commissioned a scheme that would be put together by young artists and chose Spencer Gore to run the project. Ginner, alongside the sculptors Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein were also involved. Ginner painted a series of large wall decorations for the scheme, with the titles Chasing Monkeys, Birds and Indians and a triptych Tiger Hunting. The subject matter of the present study possibly relates to the first of these murals, although there are notable comparable similarities to photographs that exist of a lost painting from the Tiger Hunting series (see fig.1 below).

fig.1- Charles Ginner, Tiger-hunting mural in the Cave of the Golden Calf 1912, Central panel of triptych, Distemper on canvas Approximately 183 x 183 cm (untraced)]

Sadly all of these mural panels are now lost or untraced and this work is an important surviving reference to the style of the scheme. Painted at the most exciting moment of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century, they suggest that Gore and his group were as engaged with the dominant artistic themes of the era (particularly the primitivism of the 1910s) as any artist in Britain at that period. Ginner, who went on with Gore to be a leading figure of the Camden Town Group, was never more cutting-edge and modern than this.