Design for Deer Hunting Mural in the Cabaret Theatre Club
Date:
1912
Materials & Techniques:
Oil and chalk on paper
Dimensions:
11 x 24 inches (27.9 x 61 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1985.3.1
Gallery Label:
London’s first nightclub, the Cabaret Theatre Club, opened on June 26, 1912. Its central room, known as the Cave of the Golden Calf, was decorated by a group of avant-garde artists on the theme of bacchic revelry. Jacob Epstein carved and painted columns like totem poles; Wyndham Lewis painted a vorticist drop curtain; Eric Gill carved and gilded a calf by the entrance; and Charles Ginner painted large scenes of tiger hunting, for which this is one of the preliminary designs. The club’s paradoxical manifesto stated, “We want surroundings, which after the reality of daily life, reveal the reality of the unreal.” Spencer Gore masterminded the overall artistic scheme and contributed a mural on canvas whose jagged lines, hot colors, and large scale dominated the room. Hunters rode barebacked horses in pursuit of deer grazing on the hills below. The club lasted only two years before going bankrupt, and Gore’s original canvas has been lost since then. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
