ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sense of opposition between Englishness as an ideal of cultural unity identified with the rural, and negative perceptions of urban modernity as either a fragmented and chaotic experience or as an overly regulated and systematized one. Letchworth as pictured by Spencer Gore appears, initially at least, as a place where both the romantic illusions of individual freedom and of collective progress could apparently co-exist and where the sharp divisions between town and country could be dissolved. In that sense the artist presents the possibility of what, in another context, has been described as 'an ideal modernity'. The painting of another Camden Town Group member, Malcolm Drummond – In the Park (St James' Park) 1912 – might be seen as an English urban response to Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jattef 1884–1886, and to an extent Gore's is a semi-rural version.
