Laura Sylvia Gosse
British, 1881 – 1968
The Fountain, ca. 1939
Oil on canvas
28 x 20 inches
Saint Vincent Art & Heritage Collections
Gift of Michael and Aimee Rusinko Kakos

Raised within a well-connected literary and artistic family, Sylvia Gosse was sent to Paris to study at the age of thirteen. Upon her return to England, she attended St. John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools before meeting avant-garde actor turned artist Walter Richard Sickert. Her father, Sir Edmund Gosse, showed Gosse’s paintings to Sickert and immediately insisted that she learn etching at his school, known as Rowlandson House. Not long after, Sickert asked Gosse to teach alongside him. Serving as co-instructor and administrator of the school, she encountered other modernists who would come to be known as the Camden Town Group. The male-only collective of Post-Impressionists British artists included Spencer Frederick Gore, Lucien Pissarro, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, and Robert Polhill Bevan, who largely focused on depicting realist scenes of urban London. In 1913, the Camden Town Group merged with the London Group and permitted women members, including Gosse, Thérèse Lessore, Stanislawa de Karlowska, and Ethel Sands. At a time when her acceptance within the art world remained tenuous, Gosse chose to dedicate much of her effort to executing honest depictions of women.

The Fountain reveals Gosse’s sustained interest in celebrating the revelation of ordinary, communal life using unposed subjects. Amid the movement of the street, three children draw water from a public fountain in a tightly cropped composition. As in many of her figurative works, the faces of the youths are obscured—a visual device that captures the spontaneity of unstaged, workaday routines. This painting was likely created using sketches that Gosse completed onsite. After recording memorable details from a scene, she would later return to her studio before translating them into a painting. Gosse’s inclusion of the small trough at the fountain’s base indicates that this site offered a limitless supply of refreshment for humans and animals alike on a hot summer’s day.