The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Mary Johanna Gore, the artist’s widow; bought at Redfern Gallery, London, 1939 for £150 by J.W. Freshfield, by whom bequeathed to Tate Gallery 1955.

The Fig Tree is painted in artists’ oil paint on primed stretched canvas. The cloth appears to be linen and has a close plain weave. It is attached to a four-member stretcher with tacks that remain in their original position. The canvas is probably sized and has white priming that appears quite lean. It is evenly applied and retains the relatively smooth texture of the canvas; most of Gore’s other works in the Tate collection are on coarse-weave canvas.

No squaring-up or preliminary drawing is visible but the preparatory surface is covered by a substantial paint film. Drawing in the paint occurs at all levels to define the forms that may have got lost in the flurry of brushstrokes. The paint appears to be oil colour applied in several layers forming a generally lean and brittle film. The leanness of the paint layer may be due to the superimposition of several layers thinned with dilutent without the addition of medium, combined with an absorbent ground (see also Tate N04675). An accumulation of vigorous short brushstrokes has left a ragged and spiky texture that covers most of the surface. The lower applications were sufficiently dry when over-painted to retain their form. Occasionally, the white priming is visible where thinner broken strokes of paint that have not been over-painted leave it exposed.

The composition is dominated by the strong diagonal shadow cast from the building from which the scene is viewed. The apple and blue greens of the writhing foliage of the fig and other trees are contrasted with the warm oranges of the houses and walled gardens in sunlight and darker violets and mauves of the shadows. Colour rather than extreme tonal contrasts are accentuated to convey the sense of light, as with the rapid stitched accents of pink laid onto the sunlit greens and few restrained accents of bright red. The vigorous organic growth of the trees towards light is contrasted to the geometric forms of the walls, windows, drain pipes and shadows of the rows of houses that confine the trees and block out the light. The painting is unvarnished.

Following Gore’s marriage to Mary Johanna Kerr, known as ‘Mollie’, in 1912, the couple moved into a first-floor flat at 2 Houghton Place NW1, near his previous lodgings in Mornington Crescent (see Tate N03839). It appears to have been a period of great contentment for him, and during 1912 his output was prolific. It was in this year that his style started to change markedly, a process that culminated in the highly stylised paintings of Letchworth Garden City and his decorative scheme for the Cave of the Golden Calf nightclub (fig.1). While living at Houghton Place, Gore made a number of paintings from the windows of the house, both front and back, and these include several views of the rear garden. The large fig tree which grew in the next garden is sometimes shown in full leaf, as in the Tate picture, and sometimes in the bareness of winter, as in From a Window at 2 Houghton Place 1913 (private collection).1 It is possible that Gore was consciously engaged in the process of painting a series, in the manner of Claude Monet’s depictions of London, or at least that he chose to return to the same subject to depict it during different seasons even if in different compositions. The views he painted from the front of the house also follow this pattern, including two paintings showing the view up Houghton Place towards Harrington Square, which have exactly the same composition but one of which was painted in high summer and the other in winter.2 The figure standing in the garden lends human presence, and is perhaps Gore’s wife.

Other paintings of the Gores’ garden include Down the Garden, 2 Houghton Place 1912 (private collection)3 and Spring in North London 1912 (private collection).4 In The Fig Tree, as with his other paintings of trees and foliage, Gore concentrated on the textures, patterns and colours. The impressionist technique of applying short dabs of colour has been replaced here with a broader painting style, but one which follows the impressionist belief in coloured shadows. As with many other works, Gore here constructs a composition that relies on the tension of diagonal lines, the garden walls running across the picture, one of them cutting off the bottom corner, but unified by the spreading forms of the vegetation. Gore paid particular attention to the harmony of all his pictures’ colour schemes. He wrote to his pupil, John Doman Turner, explaining:

Gore’s advice to Doman Turner, to trust his eye for colour harmony rather than to theory, shows a practical and flexible attitude to painting. In another letter to his pupil, Gore wrote dismissively of neo-impressionism:

Gore first exhibited The Fig Tree at the exhibition he and Harold Gilman held at the Carfax Gallery in January 1913. The asking price was 30 guineas, one of the most expensive of his pictures in the show; The Beanfield (Tate T01859), for instance, was only priced 12 guineas because of its smaller size. The pictures that had higher prices in the exhibition were all either garden or music-hall scenes. Gore held business-like views about the relative value of his pictures. In 1909 he had written to Doman Turner:

This might suggest, therefore, that the more numerous subjects of gardens, parks and music halls that Gore made were partly painted because there was a stronger market for them, a consideration in his choice of subject matter from which it was impossible to escape.

Gilman painted a view from Gore’s window of the tree on other side of the garden in The Tree, from 2 Houghton Place 1912 (private collection).8