The Camden Town Group in Context

By descent from the artist to his niece Patience Scott 1922, by whom presented to Tate Gallery 1924.

Executed with charcoal and watercolour on laid cream paper, The Concert on the West Pier, Brighton is inscribed with the title and the artist’s signature in graphite at the bottom right corner. The paper is medium weight and of good quality and has kept its strength. It has uneven edges that are torn on three edges and a deckle edge on the left. There are three creases running along the lower left edge and pinholes in the four corners.

The charcoal lines are neatly drawn with uniform width and tone. Watercolour has been applied in solid blocks to areas of the image, principally over the drawing. A fixative seems to have been used on the charcoal drawing as it has not been adversely affected by the application of the watercolour. However, the charcoal has become abraded in areas. The original tone of the watercolour is well preserved.

The paper undulates slightly overall and while there are some minor foxing spots, generally it is in good condition.

This picture has formerly been dated in Tate catalogues c.1911–18, but it must post-date 1916 as this was when the concert hall opened on the West Pier. Fox Pitt moved to Brighton in 1911, and remained there until 1918 when he moved to Thorpe in Surrey. The painting of Concert on the West Pier, Brighton appears therefore to date from the years 1916–18.

Brighton’s West Pier recorded larger numbers of visitors in this period. In 1910–11 nearly 1.5 million people paid to go through the turnstile. During the First World War attendance fell off to a low point of 894,000 in 1915–16, but this recovered after the war’s end; in 1918–19 two million people were recorded. Between 1914 and 1916 the West Pier’s covered bandstand was demolished. An eight-sided concert hall was built in its place, constructed around a skeleton of cast-iron arches which elegantly spanned the inner space without columns. The hall had capacity to seat 1,400 people. The inaugural concert took place on 20 April 1916 with a performance by the King’s Royal Rifles silver band, made up of wounded men and those physically exempted from combat. The performers in Fox Pitt’s watercolour are not wearing military uniform, and include women performers such as the pianist, and so it does not depict this grand occasion. The empty seats among the audience would also support this. Instead, he appears to show a daytime concert with those in the audience made up of women and those men beyond the age of military conscription, more visible in the final oil version of the composition (fig.1). The stand in front of the conductor bearing the number ‘4’ visible in the watercolour was used to indicate which item on the programme the orchestra was playing.1 The girders which supported the domed roof have a certain resonance in Fox Pitt’s watercolour with works such as Harold Gilman’s painting of Leeds Market c.1913 (Tate N04273, fig.2), and this may have exerted some conscious or unconscious influence over him in planning his own work. Gilman’s painting was exhibited at the 1915 London Group exhibition, and it was probably there that it was bought by Fox Pitt’s friend Walter Taylor. Taylor and Fox Pitt were on friendly terms and for a time shared living accommodation together in Brighton, and so it is highly likely that Fox Pitt was familiar with Leeds Market. Such architectural elements were also a characteristic of Charles Ginner’s paintings, with which Fox Pitt would have been familiar through his viewing of the Camden Town and London group exhibitions. A further, more distant artistic connection could be made to the theatre paintings of Edgar Degas. The proximity of the audience and musicians in such works by Degas have only a distant echo in Fox Pitt’s concert scene, but he is likely to have seen such works or to have discussed them with Walter Sickert or Spencer Gore. As Fox Pitt would also have been aware, Gore himself had also painted the exterior of the West Pier in two oil paintings in 1913 during a family visit to Taylor, Brighton Pier (Southampton Art Gallery)2 and The West Pier, Brighton (private collection).3

By November 1916 the West Pier had its own orchestra performing in the hall, and it seems likely that this is the group of players that Fox Pitt shows. The performances in the concert hall were an important source of revenue for the company that owned the West Pier. Before its construction the promenade pier derived around sixty per cent of its income from turnstile revenue. But by 1920, thirty-four per cent came from entrance charges and forty-three per cent from theatre and concert hall tickets.4

Fox Pitt was a close associate of the Camden Town Group and a collector of their pictures. But in the simplicity and unfussiness of his draughtsmanship and his use of bright colours he also shared a stylistic affinity with their working methods. Sickert commented on him in a letter dated 10 October 1913 to Nan Hudson, noting the old-fashioned nature of his clothing: ‘I saw a lovely etching of yours in Fox Pitt’s little house in Brighton. That man is rather touching. He wears old pea jackets of the eighties over his no longer 1880 tum to buy our pictures!’5 In the introduction he wrote to the memorial exhibition for Fox Pitt held at the Public Art Gallery in Brighton in 1923, James Bolivar Manson summarised how he fitted into the circle of artists around him:

In common with a number of drawings from this period, Fox Pitt has drawn the outlines of the forms in charcoal without any tonal shading. He has then tinted the areas enclosed by the outline with solid blocks of watercolour. Fox Pitt made another version of Concert on the West Pier, Brighton, identical except for having no application of watercolour. Although neither is squared for transfer, both appear to be studies for the oil painting that is in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (see fig.1), a very rare excursion in oils by the artist.