Hampstead Road, Camden Town

‘His artist’s eyes saw a violet veil drawn of mornings over the chimney-pots, Victorian facades, and grimy plane trees of Camden Town, and thus he painted them.’¹ Spencer Gore was the founder member and first president in 1911 of the Camden Town Group, and this description of his approach to painting is particularly apt for Hampstead Road, Camden Town. Until 1910 the painters of Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Street circle who were to form the Camden Town Group had tended to concentrate on figure subjects at home, and on landscapes in the country or abroad. Gore was the first to tackle London townscapes, and it was largely due to his example that Sickert and Harold Gilman also began to paint the inner-London suburb of Camden Town at this period.

Gore painted this view from 247 Hampstead Road, a building situated on the corner of Granby Street where Sickert had a studio. Characteristically, he depicted the view from the back of the building down Granby Street, showing the rail tracks that ran from nearby Euston Station, and the blank wall and billboards on the side of a row of terrace houses. Such a shabby subject was rare in British art, but it is transformed through the structure and vivid colour of Gore’s design. His viewpoint was typically from an upper-storey balcony, which flattened the scene below and allowed him to exploit its inherent geometry. The foreground balcony establishes a pattern of diagonals and vertical accents that is repeated throughout the composition in the lines of wall, roof, rail tracks, windows and poles. Colour is also used constructively; Gore has built the composition with small, contrasting touches of light-toned violet and earth colours, strikingly brighter than earlier Edwardian tonal painting, in a loose adaptation of the pointillist style of Gore’s friend, Lucien Pissarro, and its pioneer, Georges Seurat.

Innovative and widely liked amongst his contemporaries, Gore evolved a personal style that grafted elements of French post-impressionist painting to realist subject matter. He achieved a position of authority in the London art world before his death from pneumonia at the age of thirty-five.

Vicki Robson

This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009)

1. Ashley Gibson, Postscript to adventure, London, 1930, pp. 29–30, cited in Frederick Gore and Richard Shone, Spencer Frederick Gore, exhibition catalogue, Anthony d’Offay, London, 1983, n. 15, unpaginated.