Nude on Bed

This deadpan naked figure was painted in Mornington Crescent where Spencer 'Freddy' Gore lived, close to Walter Sickert. Gore had studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer - the latter's English Impressionism had an enduring influence. In 1904 Gore met Lucien Pissarro and absorbed a Neo-Impressionist technique. The style isolated Impressionism's separated blocks of colour into bright dots of paint, sometimes known as Pointillism. Although Gore began to feel that it was a 'mechanical' way to paint, its influence lingered and the blues and pinks combine here to suggest a dust-filled light in the gloom of the bedroom. Gore was a dynamic figure in the London art scene, bridging the social and stylistic gap between the English Post-Impressionists and the Modernist Vorticists, led by Wyndham Lewis. With Sickert Gore formed the Camden Town Group in 1911. Their aim was to convey a sense of place with scenes from the theatre and unidealised figures in everyday spaces, such as this bedroom. Because she is not idealised and because the room is humble this representation would have been viewed as scandalous by a contemporary audience, with some identifying the figure as a prostitute. Traditionally in art the female nude was usually represented as a figure from literature or mythology, and not a real naked woman.