The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Mary Johanna Gore, the artist’s widow; bought Paterson and Carfax Gallery, London, 1920 by Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1863–1931) for £94.10s; his widow, Lady Olivier Cavendish-Bentinck bequeathed to Tate Gallery 1940.

Richmond Park is painted in artists’ oil paints on primed stretched canvas. The support is stretched onto a four-member stretcher and retains its original attachment with tacks. A fragment of a paper label, which appears to be in Harold Gilman’s hand, is adhered to the back (see also Tate T02260). It bears the partial inscription: ‘S.F. Gore in 1914: | Park, unsigned. | (206)’. The canvas appears to be linen and has a relatively fine weave in comparison to Gore’s other works. The canvas was prepared and supplied pre-stretched by George Rowney & Co and it is the same type of ‘Quality B’ canvas used for From a Window in Cambrian Road, Richmond (see Tate N03558). The cloth has been prepared with glue size, which formed a thick layer when applied. There is a dense white primer, which was evenly applied and retains the canvas weave texture. The preparatory surface seems quite lean and as such would have provided a slightly absorbent ‘ground’ for painting.

The outline of the composition was freely sketched in thinned blue paint and subsequently modified during painting (see also Tate T02260). The picture is loosely built up using opaque mixtures of oil paint, which have dried to a slightly matt finish. Colours are applied in dabs, broken strokes and scumbles that retain vigorous brushmarking. Several modifications were made during painting, for example to the height and the position of the tree in the foreground and to the height of the copse of trees behind. These were reworked by overlaying the paint used to colour the sky, obliterating the underlying layers and moving the point at which the trees appear to intersect the sky. Traces of the earlier position of the tree can be glimpsed through the overlying layers of paint but this is probably because the paint has become more transparent over time. ‘Pentimenti’ and other underlying stages in the painting, are deliberately left visible at the surface, where the overlying fluid paint has conformed to the texture of underlying painted shapes, forming ridges. Final touches reinstate glimmers of sky in between the forms of the trees, defining the point at which they meet. The surface is unvarnished retaining the relatively matt aesthetic of the painting.

Richmond Park was just a short distance from Gore’s home at 6 Cambrian Road, the Cambrian Gate entrance being about a hundred yards away. The park must have exerted a strong fascination as it formed the subject of around twenty-five canvases, made in just a few months.1 In this remarkable series of works he retreated from the hard-edged geometry that characterises the pictures he had made in Letchworth Garden City in 1912 and to a certain degree some of those made early in Richmond. Gore rediscovered the poetry and lyricism of pure landscape that had been a characteristic of his earlier work. Yet the Richmond Park series also mark another stride in the artist’s development and ever evolving vision. The loose patches of colour in many of these pictures demonstrate that while he had thoroughly absorbed the style of Paul Cézanne, he had also gone further to find his own unique mode of expression. As a series, rather like all Gore’s work, they possess a spirit of constant transition, each new canvas refining and revising the style and execution of the one before. Although restricted in their subject matter, or perhaps because of it, these pictures display a new breadth and firmness of structure, as well as a remarkable sensitivity and delicacy. Their colour range and harmony is particularly noticeable.

But Gore’s hard work in Richmond Park and great devotion to this series was to lead to his destruction. He followed a regime of painting outdoors, directly before the subject, and in March 1914 he got wet and contracted pneumonia. Within just a few days he was dead.

The Tate picture is among the larger Richmond Park canvases Gore made. It is an austere composition of a row of trees, stretching regularly across the canvas in a band. But Gore lends the scene rhythm and interest by subtle modulations of the paint, applying it in a series of dabs, the warmth of the russet tones contrasting with the cooler, darker colours of the trees and the sky above. This is a winter scene, the bracken now brown, and perhaps the suggestion of a slight mist among the trees. The solitary tree that stands nearer has a guard around it to stop damage from the deer native to the park. Establishing the location of the scene is difficult as the trees in Richmond Park have changed in the intervening period. But a row of trees close to the pond near Cambrian Gate have a very close resemblance and would fit Gore’s usual practice of painting scenes close to home.