The Camden Town Group in Context

Gore, whose great uncles had founded the Old Stagers together with the I Zingari – strolling cricketers and players – belonged to a family and circle of related families in which during at least five generations everyone had been expected to sing or dance and act. Whether his cousins wished to raise money for university extension lectures at Market Drayton, the Boys Brigade at Keswick, or soldiers’ and sailors’ orphans at Gravesend, Gore’s talent was much in demand as comic policeman, Victorian father or singer of character songs ... ‘The grouping of six Eastern ladies’, said the press cutting from Keswick in 1900, ‘in the character song by Mr Gore (who is evidently an accomplished actor) presented a very pretty effect and was loudly applauded’.1

If you are going only one evening at a time, draw as quickly as you can and leave. Or draw only the head or hands or legs with the bit of scenery it comes against. It is very difficult to get very much out of a whole figure in one night.8

The Takiness are certainly novel. The voice of His Takiness, while resembling that of a bull of Bashan, possesses all the depth and timbre of a gigantic bumble-bee. He never condescended to utter an intelligible sound, but his bell-like notes pierced the heart of Her Takiness, who was a charming contrast to her booming partner.16

That great painter Degas made the ballet and the dancers therein so peculiarly his own property that it has become a dangerous subject for any lesser painter to attempt. Louis Legrand has won some temporary success by reflecting Degas through his more commonplace temperament, but with all his cleverness he has not succeeded in conveying to us any new message. Mr. S.F. Gore, in his visions of the Alhambra stage, is as much as himself and as little reminiscent of any other painter as he is in his figures and still-lifes. The ballet affords him opportunities of colour which he interprets in his own way, the way of a colourist rather than the way of a draughtsman. This is not to disparage Mr. Gore’s draughtsmanship, for his nude studies must convince the dullest how fine is his sense of form, but it is a clumsy way of emphasising the absolute distinction between his point of view and that of Degas ... Mr. Gore has found at the Alhambra cunning patterns of arrangement as well as glowing harmonies of colour. Admirably hung ... his ballet scene ‘On the Heath’ (4) introduces with the happiest effect the curve of the balcony as an important element in this bird’s eye design, and the spectator, looking down on this most original composition, renews within himself the emotion of unexpected pleasure which the artist must himself have experienced when he first leant over the gallery and got caught in the swirl of an unforeseen rhythm ... The collection as a whole is a song of colour, the lyrical utterance in pure, clean pigment of a refined, sensitive and naively observant personality.19

It was actually the first painting that I acquired. My diary reminds me that on the night of November 7th 1910 I met Gore by appointment at 19 Fitzroy St and purchased Inez and Taki for £10. We brought it back in a taxi to my small flat in Clement’s Inn, Gore hung it for me, and then we dined at Gow’s, took coffee at Rule’s and then returned to Clement’s Inn for an ‘artistic jaw’.21

The old music-hall was another of his early and abiding delights. From his own experiences and the mass of material he had collected he privately printed in 1949 a short book, Old Time Music Hall Comedians, where he recalled in some detail with many quotations, the songs and personalities of famous stars, especially of the eighties and nineties.22