Footnotes

Provenance
With Lefevre Gallery, London
Sir John Mills
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 10 November 1981, lot 103
Douglas Woolf
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 18 June 1997, lot 6, where acquired by
Viscountess Macmillan of Ovenden DBE, née Ormsby-Gore, by whom gifted to
Sir Brian Williamson CBE, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Probably London, Chenil Gallery, Paintings by Spencer F. Gore, March-April 1911, cat.no.9 (as The Steeple and the Tube)
London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Anne Carlisle and 20 Paintings by Spencer Gore, June 1945, cat.no.31 (as Mornington Crescent Tube Station)

Literature
Wendy Baron, Perfect Moderns: A History of Camden Town Group, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000, p.118, cat.no.16, (col.ill.)

In the summer of 1904, twenty-six-year-old Spencer Frederick Gore, on a trip to Northern France with his friend and fellow Slade School graduate Albert Rutherston (Rothenstein), met Walter Sickert, then forty-four and already a well-established figure on the London art scene. The two formed an immediate rapport, and this meeting is rightly regarded as a pivotal moment in the evolution of Modern British painting, giving rise to one of the foremost artistic movements of early 20th-century London.

The Camden Town Group, as they came to be known, was a short-lived but influential collective of British Post-Impressionist artists. Led by Sickert and Gore, the group developed a distinctive visual language focused on everyday urban life, portraying scenes of working-class London with bold colour, expressive brushwork, and an unflinching sense of social realism.

By 1909, a year before creating the present work, Gore had settled at 31 Mornington Crescent, living and working just a stone's throw from Sickert, who resided at number 6 at the opposite end of the crescent. From his west-facing studio window, Gore painted many scenes of the local surroundings. In his review of Gore's solo exhibition at the Chenil Galleries in 1911, where the present work was likely displayed, the critic Frank Rutter singled out Gore's Mornington Crescent paintings, noting his belief that 'it is the hallmark of the true artist that he does not have to wander far afield in search of beauty. He finds it ever waiting for him at his own door, as Mr. Gore has found in his exquisite Mornington Crescent series.' (F. Rutter, The Sunday Times, 1911)

In 1912, after marrying his partner Mollie Kerr, Gore moved to 2 Houghton Place and later settled in Richmond. Tragically, in 1914, shortly before the First World War, Gore contracted pneumonia after being caught in a storm while painting outdoors and died at just 35 years old. His untimely death deeply affected his peers, who responded with heartfelt obituaries celebrating his life and work. In his own tribute, Sickert evoked Gore's connection to Mornington Crescent and described the subject of the present work:

"There was a few years ago a month of June which Gore verily seems to have used as if he had known that it was to be for him the last of its particularly fresh and sumptuous kind. He used it to look down on the garden of Mornington Crescent. The trained trees rise and droop in fringes, like fountains, over the little well of greenness and shade where parties of young people are playing tennis. The backcloth is formed by the tops of the brown houses of the Hampstead Road, and the liver-coloured tiles of the Tube Station." (W. Sickert, New Age, 1914)

Mornington Crescent exemplifies Gore's masterful command of colour harmonies and structural composition. The confident brushwork and subtle tonal variations in the gardens below contrast strikingly with the formality of the buildings rising above the canopy and the distinctive red of the underground station, capturing both the physical space and mood of this early 20th-century London milieu. This marks the work as a prized example of the Camden Town Group's legacy.

In 1928, fourteen years after Gore's death, the gardens of Mornington Crescent were built over to make way for the Carreras cigarette factory. Upon learning of the planned development, believing that shops would be constructed on the site, fellow artist Walter Bayes wrote to The Times. He fondly recalled the artist working there: 'the bright spirit of Spencer Gore, who, standing at his easel in the most inclement weathers, painted so many charming pictures there to the accompaniment of the hum of the trains.' (W. Bayes, The Times, 1928). In a light-hearted gesture, Bayes proposed that the new development be named 'Spencer Gore's Grove' in the artist's memory.

The present work enjoys exceptional provenance, having once been part of the collection of Sir John Mills, the English actor who appeared in over 120 films across an illustrious seven-decade career. More recently, it has been owned by Viscountess Macmillan of Ovenden DBE, daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and the late Sir Brian Williamson, the esteemed financier.