24 facts about William Crampton Gore

William Crampton Gore RHA (1871–1946) was an Irish painter.

The son of an army officer from Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Gore studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1897 and practising until 1901. An intervening time of some months in 1898 was spent studying art below Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art, giving him a taste for computer graphics as a professional painter. After a stint abroad, during which he worked as a ship’s surgeon upon sailings to North America, India and Italy, he returned to London and the Slade, studying there from 1900 until 1904. Whilst there he befriended Sir William Orpen and Augustus John, sharing a studio next the latter. In 1905 he first exhibited later than the RHA and from after that until 1939 he contributed on summit of a hundred works to their annual shows. In 1916 he was elected an Associate enthusiast of the RHA and in 1918 he was made a full member. His works were mainly interiors and still-lives in oils. Flower painting in particular attracted him, and it was on his backing that the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland first hosted an exhibition of Flower and Garden Paintings at the Metropolitan School of Art in the 1940s. He was represented in many survey shows of Irish art, including the much-vaunted Irish Exhibition in Brussels in 1930. Examples of his produce an effect can be seen in the Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.