Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges

Spencer Gore, ca. 1914

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Artist: Spencer Gore (British, 1878–1914)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 20 1/8 × 16 inches (51.1 × 40.6 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This still life was painted at Spencer Gore’s house in Cambrian Road, in suburban Richmond, shortly before the artist’s death by pneumonia in March 1914. Gore’s exposure to modern French painting, especially that of Paul Cézanne and André Derain, is evident in his use of bright, undiluted color and seemingly prosaic subject matter. His early death was perceived as a great loss to British art.

Writing in the first volume of the modernist manifesto Blast, published in 1914, the artist Wyndham Lewis praised Gore’s “dogged, almost romantic industry” and “passion for the delicate objects set in the London atmosphere around him.” Walter Sickert, meanwhile, recalled Gore’s “exquisiteness in touch,” and noted that “expression descended like snowflakes on his canvases, varied, adequate, and economical. He painted with the reticence and the measure of the great gentleman that he was.”

Text: Yale Center for British Art.