The Camden Town Group in Context

...; Sotheby’s, London, 15 May 1985 (100, part of a large folio of watercolours and drawings by Fox Pitt); purchased by the artist’s great niece Sarah Fox-Pitt and Anthony Pitt Rivers, by whom presented to Tate 2009.

The Stafford Gallery is executed on cream laid paper, which has an unidentified elaborate watermark. The work has been painted on the centre of the sheet of paper, leaving an unpainted border around the edge.

The vivid colours of the watercolour are still apparent, though the red of the floor in the bottom right-hand corner is rather dark, possibly owing to the paper becoming too wet when the watercolour was painted. The paper has been left unpainted in some areas, such as the clothes in the paintings on the wall. Charcoal has been used to accentuate outlines and for shading on the figure’s clothes. In places, such as the sofa, the charcoal has been applied while the paint was still wet.

The paper is quite discoloured and there is significant surface dirt on the border and a repaired tear on the lower edge of the sheet. The right-hand edge of the paper is the most damaged, suggesting that this edge protruded from the portfolio in which the drawing was stored.

Although he was never one of its formal constituents, Douglas Fox Pitt was part of the circle around the Camden Town Group. When they disbanded and reconvened as the more radical London Group in 1913 – containing the advanced modern elements of David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and the vorticists – Fox Pitt became a founder member. His own art nevertheless followed the progressive but still conservative figurative style established by the Camden Town painters, most notably adopting their bright, post-impressionist palette. Fox Pitt’s pictures of street scenes and city landscapes to some degree also recall Camden Town Group subject matter. A man of independent means, he worked generally in watercolour, and his pictures became known through a series of London exhibitions of scenes painted on foreign travels in India, Morocco and elsewhere. Closer to home, views of Brighton formed the most common subject in his art.

This watercolour of the Stafford Gallery, however, is a rare document of an early exhibition by the Scottish Colourist J.D. Fergusson at a London venue known for its displays of avant-garde art around 1912. The Stafford Gallery was a short-lived centre for the showing of modern French art. It held one of the first exhibitions of Paul Gauguin’s paintings in 1911, and this was commemorated by Spencer Gore in his well-known painting Gauguins and Connoisseurs 1911 (fig.1). Other shows included an exhibition of Pablo Picasso drawings in 1912, and early London exhibitions of Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.

Fox Pitt’s watercolour illustrates a group of paintings from the Exhibition of Pictures by J.D. Fergusson at the gallery from 9 March 1912. The central picture in the watercolour is number two in the catalogue, La Dame aux Oranges c.1908–9 (whereabouts unknown)1, which may depict Fergusson’s friend, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice (1879–1959);2 to its right is number three, Le Manteau Chinois 1909 (Fergusson Gallery, Perth);3 and on the left is number one, The Red Shawl 1908 (University of Stirling).4 Interestingly, in the exhibition catalogue it states the prices for these three paintings: The Red Shawl is £500, La Dame aux Oranges is £300, and Le Manteau Chinois is £500. This is far more than any Camden Town Group painter ever charged for one of their pictures. If the numbering in the catalogue follows the exhibition, the obscured paintings on the right of the watercolour may be numbers four to seven: Le Valeur de la Science (£200), Une Rue, Royan (£50), The Spanish Shawl (£200) and Le Compotier (£40). The art critic Frank Rutter later said of the central painting: ‘A wealth of accessories in La Dame aux Oranges orchestrated the curves and contours peculiar to the sitter into a rhythmic fugue of line and colour’.5

The viewpoint of Fox Pitt’s watercolour is from the vantage point of the stairs down to the gallery, which can be seen at the top of the picture. Evidently, he utilised the same spot as Gore had done – most likely on a landing – and the watercolour’s standpoint and overall composition is identical to Gore’s painting, including the small sofa and motif of looking down on the figure beneath.

Despite the essentially traditional nature of Fox Pitt’s work he was nevertheless a staunch apologist and ally of the avant-garde. In 1910 he wrote to the New Age to defend Roger Fry’s controversial post-impressionist exhibition:

As an artist who had lived in Paris and been exposed to the most recent cubist developments in modern art, Fergusson was one of the most advanced members of the London avant-garde. Fox Pitt’s commemoration of the showing of his pictures at the Stafford Gallery again appears to ally himself with the progressive nature of Fergusson’s art, and also raises its significance as the subject of art as an event of significance for the development of contemporary culture. This, too, had been an aspect of Gore’s painting of the Gauguin exhibition.