Blackmore Vale (alt. title: Blackmoor Vale)

This is the first of many landscapes painted in and around the Blackmore Vale, Dorset, where Spencer and his wife Ursula would rent a farmhouse from 1932-45. This was painted the previous year, when they were renting a cottage just outside Shaftesbury. Its sweeping muted palette, high horizon, and graphic treatment of the clouds recall the landscapes of Eric Ravilious. The 1930s saw a resurgence in landscape painting, with artists John Nash, Paul Nash and John Piper also returning to a romanticised vision of the English countryside.

Date: 1931
Inscriptions: lr: GILBERT SPENCER 1931
Tags: Landscape, Oil Paintings
Medium: Oil on canvas
Height (mm): 610
Width (mm): 1067
Location: Manchester Art Gallery 1932.43
Exhibition History: Goupil 1932 (48); Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, November 1962-January 1963; Reading 1964 (34)
Provenance: p
Literature: Spencer 1974 p. 117; Gough 2024 p. 179, illus. pp. 181-2