Four wartime landscapes by Gilbert Spencer to appear at Dreweatts
Painted during the artist’s years in the Lake District, all four works were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1946.
Four paintings by Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), dating from his wartime years in the Lake District, are to be offered at Dreweatts on 13 October 2026 as part of the sale Going for a Walk with Andrew Allfree.
The paintings were executed between approximately 1941 and 1946, when Spencer, the younger brother of Stanley Spencer, was living in the Lake District following the wartime evacuation of the Royal College of Art to Ambleside. As Professor of Painting at the college, Spencer continued teaching while also producing landscapes of the surrounding countryside and undertaking commissions as an official war artist.
The most substantial of the four is Busk, Little Langdale (lot 163), an oil on canvas measuring 63.5 × 76 cm, estimated at £5,000-8,000. Its gently undulating landscape, scattered trees and winding country lane are characteristic of Spencer’s affectionate but carefully structured depictions of rural England. The painting was acquired from Ernest Brown and Phillips in 1946 by D. Gunary and subsequently appeared in the 1987 exhibition The Artist as Evacuee: The Royal College of Art in the Lake District, 1940-1945, held at Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere.
The remaining three paintings are Busk How, Little Langdale (lot 160), The End of the Wood (lot 161) and Rydal Water (lot 162), each estimated at £2,000-3,000. The latter has a documented provenance through the Behrend collection and previous appearances at Christie’s in 1973 and Sotheby’s in 1979.
Remarkably, all four paintings were included in Spencer’s solo exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries in May 1946. Their appearance together at auction, eighty years later, offers an opportunity to reconsider a distinctive period in the career of an artist whose achievements have often been overshadowed by those of his more celebrated brother.
The sale takes place at Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, on 13 October 2026.
View the four paintings in Dreweatts’ auction catalogue.
