View from a Window in the Hampstead Road is an archetypal Camden Town Group painting by one of the milieu’s key painters, Spencer Gore. Quiet suburban streets of this kind were depicted by Gore and his contemporaries Harold Gilman and Robert Bevan on many occasions. This work was likely painted from life with the artist’s easel set up by the window. The scene is looking north along the Hampstead Road, the mid-afternoon sunshine drenching the scene in broad daylight from the west. The picture is keyed up in hues of mauve, pink and pale blue. The shade is painted in full colour, with the houses, walls and railings casting blue and lilac shadows. A further degree of compositional formality is produced by the window frame, the vertical bar of which echoes the street lamp outside. A horse-drawn wagon is parked along the side of the road. In the lower right-hand corner of the scene, a housemaid is scrubbing the steps leading up to a doctor’s surgery. The art historian Wendy Baron wrote the following passage about View from a Window in the Hampstead Road in her book The Camden Town Group: "Gore’s natural sense of design and construction probably led him to develop the idea of painting views, urban and rural, from windows. It is possible that Sickert’s La Seine du Balcon, painted in Paris in the autumn of 1906, provided his initial inspiration. However, whereas Sickert went outside on to the balcony to paint, Gore generally remained on the inside and made use of the window frames to articulate his compositions. In 1907 both Sickert and Gore suggested the landscape behind their figures set before windows, but Gore alone took the next step of omitting the figure. Another more radical example [shows] Euston Station through the bars of the nursery window at Rowlandson House [fig. 1]." Gore was intrigued by his Camden Town surroundings and used them as the subject-matter for his pictures. Baron titled the painting View from a Window and was unaware of the precise location it depicted, although she correctly surmised that it was somewhere ‘in the Camden Town, Hampstead Road neighbourhood’. Since then, the scene has been identified as the intersection of the Hampstead Road and Rutland Street. (View from a Window in the Hampstead Road may be the picture exhibited as ‘Rutland Street’ in a joint exhibition of Gore and Harold Gilman’s work, held by the Carfax Gallery in January 1913.) It was painted in 1911 from the third floor of Rowlandson House, an art school run by Gore’s friend Sickert. In 1912 Gore moved from Mornington Crescent to the nearby Houghton Place. This work was owned for many years by the eminent philanthropist and art collector Simon Sainsbury (1930–2006). He formed a small collection of modern British pictures, amongst many other specialist interests, including works by Robert Bevan, Gwen John, William Nicholson, Samuel John Peploe, Matthew Smith and Stanley Spencer.