The Camden Town Group in Context

 The third exhibition of the work of the Camden Town group is only just over at the Carfax, when the same gallery is brought once more into the limelight by an exhibition of paintings by Mr. Spencer F. Gore and Mr. Harold Gilman. Mr. Gore, as a matter of fact, is president of the Camden Town group, and Mr. Gilman is one of its most distinguished members. I have had occasion to speak of their works in noticing the recent exhibition. In this new show one finds them subservient to no one. Two or three of Mr. Gilman’s paintings are retained from the preceding exhibition, notably “The Reapers, Sweden,” and “Veranda [sic], Sweden”; but while on the whole both artists were comparatively restrained then, they are now flagrantly and delightfully progressive. They are very clever if only for not being post-impressionists or cubists, but something that is at present without a name, unless it be Camden. In their colour and lighting they are splendid, and it is only in their form that they will annoy those who have not been assimilating them by easy stages during the past few years. They both paint back streets and shabby back gardens and ill-complexioned young women with no clothes, who seem to have strayed by early morning into the poorest bed-rooms in London, there to become engaged with impossible bath tubs and wash basins. In this both Mr. Gore and Mr. Gilman follow closely in the footsteps of Mr. Walter Sickert, who is the high priest of this sort of thing. Occasionally they branch out into an almost conventional landscape, and one wonders why on earth they cannot more often be conventional. Putting their affectations and conceits on one side, they paint very fine and interesting pictures.