The Camden Town Group in Context

Probably in the artist’s possession at his death and inherited by his sister Ruby Dyer; probably given by Ruby Dyer to Anton Lock; sold Christie’s 9 June 1978 (59, reproduced pl.8) as ‘Property of Anton Lock’; bought by Anthony d’Offay Ltd., London, by whom sold to a private collector 1982; bought by Anthony d’Offay Ltd., London, by whom sold to Tate Gallery 1984.

Victoria Embankment Gardens is painted in artists’ oil paints on primed stretched canvas. The support is attached to a four-member stretcher with tacks, which are closely spaced to support the weight of the painting. The cloth is jute with a plain weave and coarse texture, due to the thick and uneven threads that are rather loosely woven. The canvas has a thin glue sizing and dense off-white priming, which has been evenly applied so as to retain the canvas weave texture and provide tooth. Two layers of primer have been applied; a thin opaque layer containing lithopone and gypsum over a thicker transparent grey layer containing synthetic blue ultramarine.1 The composition of the priming may be unusual for a British painting of this date, although Spencer Gore appears to have been using similar materials in his priming around 1912–13 (see Tate T01859 and T01960).

Visible evidence of preparatory work is obliterated by the paint film. Boldly delineated outlines enclose the tightly packed mosaic of shapes, with minimal detail or modulation of form. The paint is applied to a consistent thickness of around 3 mm. The shapes are painted in short strokes of opaque oil colour of a consistent viscosity. The emphatic brushwork is retained in peaks and troughs in the dried paint film. Each brushstroke is applied with minimum intermixing with previous work, although the paint is often worked wet-on-wet, there are strokes of contrasting broken colour sometimes applied over existing colours to enrich the colour effects, as in the foreground. The painting developed some areas of shrinkage cracks as the paint dried and subsequently brittle cracks that formed in the hardened, aged paint. This is apparently common in Ginner’s painting but is particularly noticeable in areas of lime green, dark red and olive brown coloured paint in this work (see also Tate T03096). The surface is unvarnished and retains the opaque, relatively matt aesthetic of the paint.

The third of Ginner’s pictures of the centre of London, after The Café Royal 1911 (Tate N05050) and Leicester Square 1912 (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery), this work depicts the Houses of Parliament from an unusual viewpoint in Victoria Embankment Gardens. The two highest towers are half-hidden behind foliage: Big Ben on the left and the Victoria Tower, with a flag, on the right. Below them, looking like a crown, is the tower at the north end of Scotland Yard; at the left in a gap between the trees appear two of the smaller turrets of the Palace of Westminster. None of these buildings is painted accurately in detail. In the middle ground, not easily distinguished, is Edgar Boehm’s 1884 full-length statue of William Tyndale (1484–1536, the translator of the New Testament from Greek into English), while in the foreground a woman with a large yellow hat sits on a bench, possibly reading a book. The picture was painted in the early summer and so the buildings are partly concealed and largely upstaged by the patterning of the flower beds, bushes, trees and, behind everything, the clouds. There are no shadows to indicate the time of day, but the clock face of Big Ben might read three o’clock.

The style of this painting, with heavy outlines around islands of green, blue and yellow, was a departure for Ginner, and not repeated so far as is known. He had tried it out for the first time the summer before in France in a small oil sketch, Neuville Lane 1911 (fig.1).1 That landscape mainly shows foliage, with areas of colour separated by thick outlines placed beside each other like pieces of a jigsaw. There is a small building concealed within the foliage, as are the buildings in Victoria Embankment Gardens.

In his appreciation of Harold Gilman, Ginner mentions that they discussed the paintings by Vincent van Gogh they had seen in a private collection in Paris, that of the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim.2 The visit was most probably in the early autumn of 1910.3 Admission to the private collection was probably arranged with Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), the critic and dealer who ran Bernheim-Jeune, the contemporary part of the commercial gallery on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. It is evident that Ginner was then already familiar with van Gogh’s painting, and was showing it to Gilman.

The art historian Wendy Baron considers that Ginner’s change in style in Victoria Embankment Gardens resulted from a renewed interest in van Gogh following this visit,4 and that he probably deliberately studied and imitated the Dutch artist’s painting as a way of escaping from the laborious application of paint in works like The Café Royal (Tate N05050) of the previous year. But Neuville Lane and Victoria Embankment Gardens should also be placed in the context of paintings by Maurice Denis which had been shown in Brighton in 1910,5 and which Ginner would have known from his time in Paris. The decorative, swirling lines of Ginner’s landscapes are also linked to the illustrations for magazines that he had drawn in the early 1900s.6 The Times reviewer wrote in 1954: ‘the painting exhibited in which he follows van Gogh most faithfully, the “Victoria Embankment Gardens” of 1912, emerges as a piece of pure decoration with a strong flavour of art nouveau’.7

The painting is recorded in Ginner’s notebooks for 1912 with no mention of any purchaser (fig.2).8 He first exhibited it in July 1912 at the Allied Artists’ Association, and had probably finished it shortly before, judging from the season depicted. The critic P.G. Konody reviewed the group exhibition at the Little Gallery in 1914, pointing out how different were the paintings by each of the Camden Town Group exhibitors, except in their colouring:

‘The sky is apocalyptic’, the art historian Richard Cork wrote in 1985 of this picture,10 considering it a precedent for the murals Ginner painted in May and June of 1912 in the Cave of the Golden Calf, a nightclub in Heddon Street, off Regent Street in London. The murals no longer exist but are known from Ginner’s studies.11 In their design Ginner played a game of hide-and-seek with the forms, showing African animals half-concealed behind trees painted in bright colours, similar to the overwhelming foliage in Victoria Embankment Gardens.

The painting was not exhibited between 1914 and Ginner’s memorial exhibition of 1953. Since no sale is recorded in his notebooks it was probably in the artist’s possession at his death in 1952. His sister Ruby Ginner Dyer inherited his pictures, and it is likely that she gave it to Anton Lock (1893–1971), who owned it at the time of the 1953 exhibition according to a note written on the stretcher. Lock was an artist and a friend who owned several of Ginner’s paintings and drawings already, and had supported him financially.12 He was a second-generation Camden Town artist in that he had been taught by both Sickert and Walter Bayes. He wrote the foreword to Ginner’s exhibition at the Leger Galleries in October 1951.

The Tate Gallery bid unsuccessfully for this painting at Christie’s on 9 June 1978, but purchased it in 1984 after an export licence was withheld by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art.