Spencer Gore 'The Icknield Way' 1912 – Post-Impressionist Landscape Art Print

The Icknield Way (1912) is one of Spencer Gore's most ambitious landscapes, painted in the bright, simplified palette he developed after seeing Roger Fry's first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. The subject is the ancient prehistoric track that crosses southern England from the Norfolk coast to the Wessex Downs — one of the oldest road systems in Britain. Gore's treatment is firmly modern: flat planes of colour, geometric pattern, the influence of Cézanne and Gauguin worked through into a distinctly British register.

Gore was a central figure in the small circle of artists who brought continental Post-Impressionism into British painting before the First World War. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1896 to 1899 alongside Augustus John, Harold Gilman, William Orpen, and Wyndham Lewis. In 1904 he met Walter Sickert in Dieppe through a mutual friend, and the two became lifelong friends. Gore's enthusiasm for Sickert's work was the principal reason Sickert returned to London in 1905 — a return that effectively re-anchored British figurative painting around Fitzroy Street.

He founded the Fitzroy Street Group with Sickert in 1907 and the Camden Town Group in 1911, becoming the latter's first president. He was the only Camden Town painter included in Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1912 to 1913, where The Icknield Way was shown. He went on to organise the Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others at Brighton in 1913, an unusually catholic show that placed the Camden Town painters alongside Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, and Edward Wadsworth.

Gore was the son of Spencer Gore Snr, the first Wimbledon tennis champion in 1877, and the nephew of Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford. He moved to Richmond with his wife and young daughter in the summer of 1913 and spent the winter painting outdoors in Richmond Park. He contracted pneumonia and died on 25 March 1914, aged 35.

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