Signed l.l.: Gilbert Spencer

Oil on canvas, 31 by 45 cm (12 ¼ by 17 ¾ ins)

In a preface to Gilbert’s Spencer’s 1974 Fine Art Society retrospective, Lady Ilford, his neighbour from his days in Hampstead, wrote: “Gilbert Spencer is essentially a painter of the English countryside… and amongst English landscape painters his work is outstanding…Gilbert and his brother Stanley, were remarkable painters – two real painters. Painters naturally and by force of instinct not merely by training and profession”.

For most of the past century Gilbert Spencer has lived in the shadow of his brother, Stanley, one of the most significant forces in British art of the past one hundred years. Only recently has he gained just recognition in his own right as a distinct figure in the English school of painting and one of the notable lyrical landscape artists of his era. Sidney Hutchinson, at one point secretary of the Royal Academy, perceptively declared that Spencer “might well be called the John Constable of the Twentieth Century.”.