Gilbert Spencer
British, 1892-1979

Grasmere Under Snow, 1941
watercolor and pencil on pulp paper
23 3/8 x 19 1/4 in.

SBMA, Gift of Ala Story to the Ala Story Collection
1966.63



A 1926 photo of Gilbert Spencer by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Gilbert Spencer, like his elder brother Stanley, studied at the Slade School immediately prior to the outbreak of World War I, in which he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In 1931 he joined the staff of the Royal College of Art , where he later became head of the Painting School, moving with the College to Ambleside in the Lake District where it was relocated for the duration of the War. Post war he was appointed head of the Painting School at Glasgow and the head of Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.

- British Modernism from Whistler to WWII, 2016

During the Second World War the Royal College of Art, where Spencer taught, was evacuated from London to Ambleside in the Lake District in northwestern England. Spencer and his wife and daughter stayed there with Professor de Selincourt in his house “Ladywood”; from here the museum watercolor was probably painted. Seen through the windows are Lake Grasmere and the Cambrian Mountain Range just outside the town of Grasmere. Of this landscape, Spencer wrote: “I never came to terms with the mountains, and treated them as sky…” In 1943 he had a sell-out one-man show at the Leicester Galleries in London in which this watercolor may have been included.

Spencer is primarily a portrait and landscape painter. The museum’s drawing is characteristic of his usual straightforward and objective approach to nature, sensitive to the qualities both of the subject and the medium, without any arbitrary aesthetic program.

- SBMA label from past exhibition