The Camden Town Group in Context

Probably purchased from the artist in 1907 by Hugh Hammersley (1858–1930); ... ; Dr Robert Emmons (1894–1963) by 1947; bought Agnew’s in 1947 by Roland, Browse and Delbanco; T.W. Strachan by 1953; Roland, Browse and Delbanco, from whom bought in 1960 by William Evan Wallace (1927–1977); his widow, Hon. Mrs Elizabeth Ann Wallace (1933–1990), from whose estate accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Tate Gallery 1991.

Girl at a Window, Little Rachel was painted on a coarse-weave linen canvas that Walter Sickert bought from the artists’ colourmen John B. Smith (see also Tate T00164). The cloth has a plain weave with uneven threads; it is sized and primed with an even coat of white primer that conforms to the canvas weave texture. There are splashes of a white water-based paint or primer on the back of the canvas and on the stretcher, but these do not appear to be contemporary with the preparation or the painting. The priming has no obvious overall toning but it is covered by much later paint and is difficult to see.

The painting is roughly brushed with rather thin paint in dull blues, greys and browns to delineate form, which tends to emphasise the visible pattern of the canvas weave texture. A more medium-rich, thicker paint has been applied over this thinner underpainting using a flat-headed brush, which exuded wet paint at the sides of each stroke and formed brushmarked impasto. The underlying layers are left visible in places where paint has been unevenly applied only partially covering underlying paint, as in the sky, for example.

Not all the brushmarks are aligned with the final image. The figure in particular appears to have been heavily reworked and there are modifications to the position of the window frame and railings. The painting has been varnished with a soft resin to provide an even gloss and saturation but the final image remains a painterly impression of the subject.

Sickert painted Girl at a Window, Little Rachel during the summer of 1907, putting off his planned trip to Dieppe and Paris as he became interested in the sequence of paintings he was making. It was an important period for the artist, when he self-consciously tried to consolidate and extend his artistic development. He wrote to his friend, the artist Nan Hudson:

But Sickert stayed on in his Mornington Crescent rooms, from where he later wrote to Hudson:

There are five other known oils of the same sitter: Girl at a Looking-Glass, Little Rachel (fig.1);3 Little Rachel (National Art Gallery of Queensland, Brisbane),4 a head and shoulders portrait, probably seated on Sickert’s bed; Little Rachel (private collection),5 a three-quarter-length portrait of the sitter half turned, with light falling on her face; and Little Rachel (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery),6 an oil study in profile. In all these works she wears the same blouse as in Tate’s picture. There are several drawings of Rachel, some of which relate to these paintings, but none of them is a study for Tate’s oil.7

According to Sickert’s title for one of these oils and one of the drawings, the sitter was the daughter of his frame maker. Using information supplied by Agnew’s, the art historian Wendy Baron records that Rachel’s surname was Siderman, and that she died in 1963 aged 70. However, on her marriage certificate her father’s profession was listed as grocer.8 Richard Kingzett of Agnew’s recalled his gallery’s Sickert exhibition of 1960 in which the canvas of Little Rachel, now in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, was displayed:

London Trade and General Post Office directories for the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century do not list any frame makers (of which, interestingly, there are a very large number) named Siderman, although he could perhaps have worked for a larger company not bearing his name. Nor does the 1911 census record anyone named Rachel Siderman, or girls with that surname of a suitable age.

Sickert’s composition is dominated by the rectangular window beside Rachel, the brighter light of the exterior piercing the darker interior of the room and falling softly across her figure. This device is used in several of the pictures from the series that Sickert painted in this room, both of Rachel and of nudes. The effect is also a feature of a painting by Edgar Degas that Sickert owned (fig.2). In 1914 Sickert set out his preference for working indoors rather than in the open air, and also some of the specific effects of indoor lighting. He drew attention to a picture by Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871), which may partly have inspired his framing of Rachel next to a window:

In Girl at a Window, Little Rachel, Sickert shows his sitter standing by the French windows of his north-facing, first-floor front room at 6 Mornington Crescent, London NW1, which he kept in 1907, just a few doors away from his friend Spencer Gore who lived at number 31. The room was rented, as Sickert wrote in a letter of 1907 to Nan Hudson addressed from Mornington Crescent, ‘I rather hope that when I come back in the autumn I may take the floor above my lodgings here as a room-studio and do the interiors I love’.11 The 1907 Kelly’s Camden and Kentish Town Directory lists the householder as ‘Mrs George Jones Jr’, who was presumably Sickert’s landlady. Mornington Crescent was only one of Sickert’s addresses, and at this time he also had another studio in Fitzroy Street. Following his return to London in 1905 Sickert had continued the practice he followed in Dieppe of keeping several studios at once, which probably sometimes doubled as living accommodation. The art critic Clive Bell recalled Sickert at a somewhat later period ‘showing us his “studios” – “my drawing studio” “my etching studio” etc. The operation involved chartering a cab and visiting a series of small rooms in different parts of London.’12

Through the window Sickert shows the view across Mornington Crescent Gardens, on which the Carreras cigarette factory was built in 1928. The steeple visible on the horizon is that of St Matthew’s Church in Oakley Square. Designed in Gothic Revival style by John Johnson, it was built in 1852–6 and demolished in 1977. Oakley Square was built at the same time as the church, part of the Bedford New Town development, which was demolished in 1980 to make way for blocks of flats.

It is likely that the first owner of Girl at a Window, Little Rachel was Sickert’s patron Hugh Hammersley. In a letter to Hudson, Sickert wrote that Hammersley, who had already bought

Hammersley made his money in the City, and spent it at the New English Art Club. He and his wife Mollie became great friends of Sickert, and he was a regular part of the circle of artists and writers who gathered at their house in Hampstead.15 Sickert’s friend and pupil, Dr Robert Emmons (1894–1963), was the first definite owner of Girl at a Window, Little Rachel. An American, he practised medicine in London during the 1920s, but painting came to be his dominant interest, and in October 1927 he enrolled as a student at Sickert’s art school at 1 Highbury Place, Islington. He exhibited his work at the Royal Academy in 1928 and 1932.16 Emmons was the author of The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert, the first biography of the artist, published by Faber in 1941, the year before Sickert died. An important collector of Sickert’s work and of other artists of the period, his collection was put on show in 1947 at Agnew’s, including Girl at a Window, Little Rachel.