The Icknield Way

Spencer Frederick Gore was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, the loose alliance of younger British painters who gathered around Walter Sickert in London from around 1911. Gore had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was among the first British artists to absorb the influence of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin from the two landmark Post-Impressionist exhibitions organised by Roger Fry in London in 1910 and 1912. The Icknield Way — an ancient trackway running from Norfolk to Wiltshire along the chalk escarpment — was painted in the same year as the second Fry exhibition and shows the Post-Impressionist influence at its most concentrated in his work. Gore died of pneumonia in 1914 at the age of 35, cutting short a career that his contemporaries considered among the most promising of his generation. The painting passed from his widow to the Redfern Gallery in London, where the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased it in 1962 from an exhibition devoted to Gore and his son Frederick Gore. The AGNSW catalogue notes that works of this kind exerted a considerable influence on the young Sydney painter Grace Cossington Smith, who may have encountered them in London as early as 1912.