Gore, Spencer

Gore, Spencer (1878–1914). British painter of landscapes, music-hall scenes, interiors, and occasional still-lifes. He was born in Epsom, Surrey, into a distinguished family: his father, Spencer Walter Gore, a surveyor by profession, was a famous sportsman (he won the first Wimbledon tennis championship in 1877); and his uncle, Charles Gore, was Bishop of Oxford. In 1896–9 he studied at the Slade School, where he was a particular friend of Harold Gilman. Another Slade contemporary was Wyndham Lewis, with whom he visited Spain in 1902. In 1904, together with Albert Rothenstein (who later changed his name to Rutherston) Gore visited Sickert in Dieppe; this marked the beginning of his close acquaintance with recent French painting (he returned to France in 1905 and 1906), and the enthusiasm of the two young painters helped to decide Sickert to return to London later that year. For the rest of his short career Gore was part of Sickert's circle, becoming a founder member successively of the Allied Artists’ Association in 1908, the Camden Town Group (of which he was first president) in 1911, and the London Group in 1913. He and Sickert often visited music halls together, and both of them painted memorable scenes of this world. His early paintings were Impressionist in style, but he was strongly influenced by Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibitions (Gore's own work was included in the second in 1912) and his later pictures show vivid use of flat, bright colour and boldly simplified forms. He died of pneumonia aged 35 and was much lamented by his many friends in the art world. Sickert said Gore was ‘probably the man I love and admire most of any I have known', and Frank Rutter described him as ‘the most lovable man I ever knew'; his obituary in the Morning Post remarked that ‘his personal character was so exceptional as to give him a unique influence in the artistic affairs of London in the last dozen years.’ His son Frederick Gore (1913– ) is a painter; Roger de Grey was his nephew.