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Gilbert Spencer:
Candlewick Curtains
Framed (ref: 10481)

Signed and dated

Oil on canvas

Tags: Gilbert Spencer oil flowers Garden landscape 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Hidden Gems - Interiors

Provenance: Private Collection

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.75.

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1967

Tree Cottage, Upper Basildon, Berkshire was where  Gilbert and Ursula Spencer stayed between 1936 -1970.

In his autobiography,  Memoirs of a Painter (1974), Spencer recalled: 

‘When I entered it for the first time I hated it so much that I knocked it about, and messed it up to get it more in sympathy with my feelings for painting in odd corners, or bedrooms, indoors. The fact is I am no “studio” artist and never have been.’ Spencer normally worked outdoors, but, in winter, would paint from his cottage windows or what he called his ‘little Colt studio’ in the garden.

 A self-portrait from the same year as Candlewick Curtains shows Spencer wrapped in a heavy overcoat painting in his studio.

Spencer painted similar compositions based on views through windows throughout his career:

Manchester Art Gallery, The Cottage Window, 1937. 

A similar compositional device appears Spencer's Home Guard series:

The Enemy, circa 1940

Candlewick is a thick, soft cotton fabric with a raised, tufted pattern.