Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.75.
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1967
Tree Cottage, Upper Basildon, Berkshire was where Gilbert and Ursula Spencer stayed between 1936 -1970.
In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Painter (1974), Spencer recalled:
When I entered it for the first time I hated it so much that I knocked it about, and messed it up to get it more in sympathy with my feelings for painting in odd corners, or bedrooms, indoors. The fact is I am no ‚Äústudio‚Äù artist and never have been.’ Spencer normally worked outdoors, but, in winter, would paint from his cottage windows or what he called his little Colt studio’ in the garden.
A self-portrait from the same year as Candlewick Curtains shows Spencer wrapped in a heavy overcoat painting in his studio.
Spencer painted similar compositions based on views through windows throughout his career:
Manchester Art Gallery, The Cottage Window, 1937.
A similar compositional device appears Spencer’s Home Guard series:
The Enemy, circa 1940
Candlewick is a thick, soft cotton fabric with a raised, tufted pattern.