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Between 1905 and 1912 Spencer Gore painted numerous scenes of music halls. Here he shows a moment from the little-known ballet On the Sands, the plot of which centered on the perils of a runaway schoolgirl; the characters ranged from naughty Eton schoolboys to colorful gypsies and sailors, some of whom can be seen on stage in this scene. On the Sands was performed in September 1910 at the Alhambra, one of the larger, more elegant music halls in central London. Built in 1883 in Leicester Square, the Alhambra was named after the citadel and palace built at Granada by the Moorish kings in the twelfth century. Every detail, such as the highly gilt piers of the proscenium and the brightly colored, decorative geometric inlays of the balcony boxes, evokes the lush, exotic beauty of such architecture, a style that turn-of-the-century audiences considered magnificently decadent. Despite its aura of sketchy immediacy and its appearance of having been painted on the spot, the painting was carefully completed in his studio from a series of drawings. Gore was a frequent visitor to the Alhambra balcony; a contemporary remarked that he was "always in the same seat, taking sights with thumb and pencil at the uplifted legs of the ballerinas."1 Of four known sketches for this composition, two are studies of the figures on stage; the third represents the elaborate architecture of the stage and box facing his seat; and the fourth, the entire composition as it appears in the oil. Clearly he used this last preparatory drawing (squared-up so as to be transferred easily to canvas) to paint the final picture. His meticulous process of working up the painting from a series of sketches lends to the composition a geometric formality that ultimately undermines the overall spontaneity of the scene: the highly patterned surface and the linear definition of the composition seem to immobilize the figures -especially the two dancing gypsies at center stage-in spite of their shimmering costumes and animated gestures. Gore preferred to depict the glittering scenes on the stages of the larger, more decorative music halls such as the Alhambra, as opposed to those in the dingier, seamier locales frequented by his mentor and colleague Walter Sickert (who had been dubbed in the 1880s "Painter-in-Ordinary to the London music hall"2). Gore's interest in painting theatrical scenes had been influenced by the older painter's fascination with music halls, but he concentrates on the festive, colorful side of the theater. Both artists were drawn to the compositional challenges inherent in two-dimensional representations of events seen onstage and to the strange artificial effects of stage lighting. The work of each has antecedents in Degas's scenes of café-concerts from the 1870s, but unlike Degas and Sickert, Gore tends-as in this image -to capture the hot and vibrant atmosphere of the stage and theater through a speckled, nearly pointilliste, type of color and brushwork. Sickert himself admitted that he looked to Gore when trying to observe color in shadows.3 By the time he painted this picture, Gore had joined Sickert as a leader of a diverse group of painters known as the Fitzroy Street Group, a name referring to their meeting place in one of London's bohemian quarters. Gore was a remarkable link figure between the splintering factions of the modern art scene of pre-war London. As a leader of the Fitzroy Street Group and later the Camden Town Group, a member of the jury of the New English Art Club, and an exhibitor at Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition, he crossed boundaries more freely than any of his contemporaries.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 176, no. 72