Although Gilbert Spencer’s many landscapes were predominantly of rural and agricultural scenes, he occasionally painted the urban environment. His urban landscapes were mostly painted in the 1920s and early 1930s, before he settled in rural Dorset and Berkshire. Throughout the 1920s, Spencer was a regular visitor and occasional lodger at 47 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London, the home of the Carline family of artists. They hosted regular gatherings of artists, and were friends of Gilbert and his brother Stanley Spencer, who in 1925 married Hilda Carline. Gilbert painted several views of the surrounding streets, and in The Terrace Garden (1927, Dudley Museums), reprised Richard Carline’s earlier painting, Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill, Hampstead (c. 1924, Ferens Art Gallery) from a low viewpoint, now bereft of its convivial occupants. This was typical of Spencer, who often brought interest to his compositions by adopting an unusually low or high viewpoint, favouring the rear, working aspect of a building, and rejecting the conventional or picturesque. In Wimborne, from the Crown (1931, untraced), painted from the second floor of a now-demolished coaching inn, the view of the medieval Minster is overshadowed by the façade of the modern Boots the Chemist.

On only a few occasions, Spencer painted or drew domestic interiors, with similarly unconventional framing. In The Cottage Window (c. 1927-37, Manchester Art Gallery) and its successor, Candlewick Curtains (1967, private collection), the opportunity to use the window as a framing device is wholly or partially rejected in favour of focusing on the window itself. Still lifes were equally rare in his oeuvre, with just four known works. The earliest, Apples in a Basket (c. 1913, private collection), painted when he was newly enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, suggests that he may have been familiar with Cezanne’s still lifes, exhibited at Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at the Grafton Galleries, London in 1910-1. Spencer’s arrangements of flowers and vessels (Still Life of Flowers in a Vase, c. 1920-35, private collection; Still life with vase of flowers, c. 1920-35; Still life on a window sill, c. 1920-5, private collection) also suggest the influence of Fry through the Bloomsbury Group, in particular the early still lifes of Vanessa Bell. These were experimental genres for Spencer and were soon abandoned in favour of the rural and agricultural landscapes that would comprise the majority of his output.