The Camden Town Group in Context

... ; by descent from her father to Mme Gefain, from whom bought by Frank Williams, Burford; his sale Sotheby’s, London, 22 April 1970 (303), £2,100; bought by Agnew’s for John A. Lumley, from whom bought by Tate Gallery 1975.

The Cinder Path is painted in artists’ oil colours on primed stretched canvas. The painting appears to have been re-stretched. This was probably carried out early on or using the artist’s original materials after his death. The stretcher bears the stamp of the artists’ colourman Percy Young, from whom Gore is known to have purchased materials (see, for example, Tate T00027). The dimensions of the support do not conform to a standard commercial size, suggesting that Gore purchased and made up the stretcher separately and bought canvas from the roll, preparing the support himself. The cloth is made of hemp fibres and has a plain open weave with some uneven threads and slubs. The left-hand edge of the canvas is a selvedge with holes used to stretch the canvas on a loom for priming. The cloth has been coated with a thick glue size. This did not prevent priming from seeping through the interstices to the back. The double-white primer is evenly applied and retains the canvas weave texture. It is composed of a thin dense layer of chalk and lithopone with zinc white over a thicker more transparent layer of chalk, gypsum and zinc white. The use of lithopone in place of lead white in the upper layer seems to reflect Gore’s interest in the whiteness of his preparatory surface (see also Tate N04675). Lithopone had greater opacity and was exceptionally white, although it was known to be unstable.1 Lithopone is also found in primers on paintings of the same period by Charles Ginner and J.B. Manson.

There are marks for squaring up the canvas on all but the left-hand edge, suggesting that the primed canvas may have been squared up for transfer before stretching. The outline composition has been drawn with dark blue paint and restated during painting (see also Tate T02260). The paint has been worked to a rich, paste-like consistency and is confidently manipulated within the drawn shapes. The directional strokes often leave the white priming visible towards the borders and where a broken stroke of stiff paint has been lifted from the brush by the canvas texture. There is some reworking of the cloud forms in the sky and the field in the middle distance. In these areas, the several layers of paint required to achieve a balance of colour and form cover the priming more completely. These denser passages are enlivened by final vibrant touches of contrasting colour. The lively texture imparted by the canvas and brushwork imparts a unifying surface scatter with occasional delicately lipped impasto. The consistency of handling and surface integrates the farmed, built and natural elements depicted. The normal expectations of perspective are gently confounded by features such as the painted linear outline of the lime green tree foliage at the near left that incorporates a building located on the horizon implying that the near and distant points physically lie on the same picture plane.

Gore used the simple but highly effective compositional device of a straight path, track or road heading directly away from the viewer’s standpoint in several Letchworth canvases, notably The Icknield Way 1912 (fig.1) and Letchworth, The Road 1912 (fig.2), although in both of these the direction is more diagonal than in The Cinder Path. He had also employed a very similar composition in a 1909 work, The Garden, Hertingfordbury (fig.3), which is painted in a more traditionally impressionist style. It is a device which strongly enhances the geometric and pattern-making effects contained in such paintings, for it leads the eye into the work where it is immediately confronted by contrasting and opposing planes, and by the angularity of stylised forms. It also provides a regulating effect, as the art historian Ysanne Holt has observed: ‘Roads and pathways were always attractive to Gore because of their ordering effect: they “suggest” a human presence and they provide both a formal and psychological stability.’1 Although the paintings are dissimilar in most respects, Gore may have been aware of Lucien Pissarro’s A Foot-Path, Colchester 1911 (private collection),2 which shows a figure walking away down a path that leads directly off into the distance and which was shown at the first Camden Town Group exhibition.

Gore took a strictly naturalist approach to painting landscapes, and generally did not introduce artificial features. Although he sometimes treated landscape in a highly stylised manner, The Beanfield, Letchworth 1912 (Tate T01859) being a notable example, he was, in fact, generally a highly accurate topographer. In his Letchworth pictures Gore evolved a practice of rationalising the shapes of trees and clouds, giving them straight edges and outlines and a highly geometric, stylised structure. However, this was always the result of an intense study of his subject and, despite such simplification of forms, he nevertheless aimed to remain true to nature. Reviewing the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in the Art News in 1910, Gore observed that:

Elsewhere, Gore emphasised to his pupil John Doman Turner his commitment to portraying things as he found them:

The Cinder Path shows a point in Letchworth where town and countryside meet, the distinctively rendered and whitewashed houses with red-tiled roofs spreading out across the horizon. This mingling was a central tenet of the philosophy that lay behind the planning of Letchworth. The town’s planner, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), wanted to see town and country married, to create a new and better way of modern living. Howard designed Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City as self-contained satellites of London, fully provided with a range of civic amenities. The architects used were the partnership of Barry Parker (1867–1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863–1940), both influenced by William Morris’s ideals of life and labour. Houses were well designed and constructed, and cheaply priced, and the landscape and layout of the towns was carefully considered. Howard believed that a good environment and quality of life would renew and inspire the population, and ultimately lead to a better society.5 In formulating his theories he was particularly influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, but Howard’s original, revelatory inspiration to build Letchworth came from reading the American writer Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Published in 1888, this novel was a fantasy about an ideal Boston in the year 2000, where capitalism had been abolished and society was now devoted to maintaining a fulfilling, mutual, egalitarian life. The novel, Howard wrote, made him realise ‘as never before, the splendid possibilities of a new civilisation based on service to the community, and not on self-interest, at present the dominant motive’.6 To develop his plans, Howard undertook a study of the industrial housing at New Lanark, Port Sunlight and Bourneville, and in 1898 published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.7 The first Garden City Association conference was held in 1901, hosted by George Cadbury, at which George Bernard Shaw was one of the speakers, and by 1903 Parker and Unwin had been commissioned to build Letchworth.

Letchworth was soberly and sensibly designed, and its houses generally made in a sort of comfortable, vernacular version of Arts and Crafts modern style. But from the start the new town attracted residents who were a heady mixture of high-minded socialists, militant vegetarians, teetotallers and eccentrics. The town pub, ‘The Skittles’, served only non-alcoholic drinks, while the school, built in 1905–7, had classrooms open to the elements so as to promote the healthy effects of fresh air on the lungs and encourage suitable conditions for theosophical meditation. Harold Gilman’s decision to commission a Letchworth house represents an adventurous choice, and a commitment to a progressive, new way of living, albeit one that looked to an idealised, agrarian, craft-based past. Gore’s Letchworth sojourn from August to November 1912 was perhaps simply a convenience, a move for the young family to more comfortable quarters while Gilman was absent. But nevertheless, the surroundings of Letchworth, or its palpable idealism, seem to have spurred Gore to produce his stylistically most advanced works.

There is some uncertainty as to the precise location of the scene shown in The Cinder Path. The writer John Woodeson believed it was at some point on the path that ran ‘from the end of Works Road in Letchworth (about a mile from Wilbury Road) across the fields towards Baldock, but subsequent building has altered the whole area’.8 This was certainly a route that was traditionally known locally as ‘the cinder path’, following the line of the railway; but the ridge rising to the horizon in the painting does not seem to be entirely borne out by the current topography of that part of town. Gore shows a large, Georgian-style house towards the left of the ridge that bears some resemblance to the convent that is on the Baldock edge of Letchworth, but it is natural brick rather than the grey rendering in the picture. For these reasons this location can seem to be discounted. A more likely identification is provided by Brynhild Parker, the daughter of Stanley Parker, whose parents lived next door to Gilman at 102 Wilbury Road. In 1982 she wrote to the Letchworth Museum and Art Gallery, and in recalling The Cinder Path wrote that this was the path ‘which we always took to go into town’.9 Based on Brynhild Parker’s letter, Anna Mercer, Curator of the Museum, wrote to the author that:

Certainly a spot closer to Wilbury Road would support Gore’s usual practice of selecting landscapes that were quite close to where he was living. Whatever the precise location, in The Footpath at Letchworth 1912 (private collection)11 Gore painted a further view from the point at which the footpath in The Cinder Path turns sharply to the left. This work includes a figure walking on the path wearing a hooded blue cloak or cowl, who might be a nun or equally someone in an eccentric costume.

Gore painted The Cinder Path from a squared-up pencil and coloured chalk drawing that is now in the British Museum (fig.4). Unusually, Gore made two oil paintings of exactly the same composition; a much smaller, less finished version is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig.5). It seems likely that he executed this version first, and possibly painted it on the spot. One version was shown in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery from December 1912 to January 1913 (116), and the other in Paintings by Spencer F. Gore and Harold Gilman at the Carfax Gallery in January 1913 (31). Although it is difficult to be absolutely certain which version was shown where, the pencil study for The Cinder Path is inscribed in an unknown hand ‘Bigger one | that was at the | Grafton after | Christmas.’ The art historian Wendy Baron considers that it was probably the Tate painting that was included in the Grafton exhibition ‘where among radical works, its size would have been an advantage’, while the smaller Ashmolean version was placed in the more ‘intimate’ Carfax Gallery.12

This is one of the largest pictures Gore made, its scale suggesting a sense of grander ambition and importance. Its composition has an unusually high horizon, something that is emphasised by the line of red-roofed houses that stretch out across it. Such a horizon was a feature of many of Robert Bevan’s landscapes made at Applehayes in Devon (see Tate T00282). Overall, Gore’s picture is held together by the strict maintenance of harmonious colour, with a preponderance of purples, pinks and mauves. He has drawn the outlines with the brush and allowed them to remain visible. In some places the canvas has been allowed to remain bare so as to give emphasis to the outline of certain forms, such as the path, the trees and the fence. The yellow of the field in the middle distance suggests that ripe corn is growing there, while the foreground crops might be turnips or mangolds. The post in the immediate foreground is foreshortened into an oblique form, and may have had directions or a name on it.

Oddly, at the top left of the picture Gore has painted some houses on top of trees, even though spatially they are behind them, making them appear as if they are floating among the greenery. Their red roofs clash against the green, emphasising them vividly. It might be assumed to be an error, but it is a feature that appears in both versions of The Cinder Path and in the study. Possibly Gore might have been trying to resolve the way in which the buildings were visible between the leaves, perhaps as the trees moved in the wind.