The Camden Town Group in Context

Sold by the artist with a group of his paintings to T.W. Spurr and Son, Southport, 1934; ... ; H. Holdsworth, Halifax, who sold it at Christie’s, London, 15 July 1938 (100), for 2 guineas; bought by Webberley Gallery, Toronto (the Webberley Gallery moved to Chicago in 1942); ... ; anonymous sale at Christie’s, London, 1 March 1974 (114, reproduced), 8,500 guineas bought by Edward Garrett; bought by Anthony d’Offay Ltd, London, 1980, by whom sold to Tate Gallery.

Piccadilly Circus is painted in artists’ oil paints on primed stretched canvas. The original stretcher has been replaced and the canvas has been lined. The original cloth appears to be of a similar type to that used for Victoria Embankment Gardens (Tate T03841). It is a plain, coarsely woven jute cloth with a heavy tooth, which has probably been sized and also appears to have the same off-white double priming. This type of canvas is prone to embrittlement with age and its weakest points, the tacking edges, would have been put under extra strain by the weight of the substantial paint film, causing them to split and eventually break away.

No initial drawing remains visible. Outlines that delineate form are applied at all stages of painting, being revised or reinforced as required. The paint thickness is in excess of 2 mm deep in most areas. Brushes up to 6 mm wide were used to apply the paint in short linear strokes often modelling the contours of the forms. In order to attain several millimetres thickness and tightly control the application, the paint would have had to be a particular viscosity. Ginner may not have used paint direct from the tube but may have mixed it on his palette to achieve the desired consistency. It has been suggested that he used ‘stand oil’, which would be consistent with the quality of the paint,1 and added this to colourman’s tube paints (see also Tate N05695). Brushwork is laid on both wet-on-dry and wet-in-wet but the relatively stiff paints seldom merge, each retaining its hue, tone and texture. Broken strokes leave underlying layers in contrasting colours visible, creating a sparkling sense of light. And small gaps and crevices are deliberately left between shapes, where brushstrokes are laid next to but not over the outline.

Open ductile cracks developed during shrinkage of the paint, and as it hardened with age, brittle cracks continued to develop through the paint and priming. The cracks are typically at right angles to the brush marking, forming interconnecting patterns in the worst affected areas such as the greens. The islands of paint formed by the interconnecting cracks would have cupped a little. Cracked and cupping paint was secured and flattened during the lining process. This type of cracking, varying in its extent, was found on all of Ginner’s paintings and is primarily due to the thickness and related drying properties of the paint film.

Ginner’s view of Piccadilly Circus in central London shows at the right the island pavement around the base of Alfred Gilbert’s statue of Eros, where a coster woman is seated on a stool selling flowers from two baskets. A smartly dressed woman in a large hat walks past, while a man to the left is partly hidden by a taxi. The taxi, two buses and a car driving around the island are shown in detail, complete with their advertisements and route signs, but their forms are difficult to make out exactly as they overlap. The viewpoint looks south towards the Criterion Grill Room and the building to its east, although the architecture in the background, which is not much of a feature of the painting, is simplified and not quite accurate in detail.1

To see this view, Ginner must have placed himself on the pavement near the Regent Street quadrant, or, more likely, within the traffic between a row of bollards that were then dividing the road into separate lanes. A photograph of Piccadilly Circus taken from an upper window in 1910 shows a flower-seller sitting in the same spot (fig.1). In this photograph several smart-looking people are walking by briskly, as in the painting, using the island as a shortcut between Regent Street and Leicester Square. The painting is larger than usual for Ginner, and is focused on the figure of the flower-seller, whose mauve scarf stands out, and who is placed beside the strongest colours in the picture, her red flowers (which are possibly anemones and chrysanthemums).

The notices on the buses are prominent and seem to be recorded accurately. The bus in the centre of the painting has the route boards, ‘CLAPHAM JUNCTION (19) HIGHBURY B[...]’ and ‘BATTERSEA BR[IDGE] KINGS Rd SLOANE (19) PICCADILLY TOTTENH[AM] | BLOOMSBURY ANGEL ISLING[TON] | HYDE PAR[K S]HAFTESB[URY]’. It carries an advertisement for the theatre ‘THE | NEW | ALHAMBR[A] | REVUE | ATTRACTION | ATMOSPHERE’. These details link some of Ginner’s favourite places. Performances at the Alhambra Theatre were a particular subject of Spencer Gore, and Ginner himself included its exterior in his Leicester Square 1912 (fig.2).

The vehicle with the registration number ‘LN 5834’ on the left is a taxi. The ‘GENERAL’ on the sides of the two buses shows that both were owned or operated by the London General Omnibus Company. The small plate on the nearer bus inscribed ‘B5’ indicates that it was based at Battersea Garage. ‘B type’ buses were introduced in 1910.2 ‘B1218’, the nearer of the two buses seen in the picture, appears to have an illuminated box at the front for the route number. If so, and it is not at all clear, Ginner was up to date, as this light was first installed in the summer of 1912.3 He liked crowded scenes and overlapping details, and in his picture of the forecourt of Victoria Station, The Sunlit Square, Victoria Station 1913 (fig.3), he again included details of buses, showing them in a sharply receding perspective.

The flower-sellers in central London (called ‘coster girls’ after the word that had originally meant sellers of fruit, or ‘costard’ apples) were standard social ‘types’ in descriptions of the city (fig.4).4 According to an article of 1906 by William Ryan, Piccadilly Circus was the easiest of their pitches in London: ‘The Shaftesbury Fountain is a luxurious position for the flower-sellers compared with some others.’5 There they could sell sitting down, whereas elsewhere their flower baskets had to be carried on a strap around their necks as they stood at the kerbside. They generally wore a similar dress with a straw boater, knitted shawl and apron. The soft, dark hat of Ginner’s woman seems unusual by comparison to contemporary photographs of flower-sellers. As she sits she is tying flowers into a bunch. Artists were attracted to coster girls as models, and a drawing by Gore of about 1909–10 shows a flower-girl posing for him, wearing a straw hat and a shawl, but looking as if she were in his studio rather than at work on the street.6 Ginner also made a pencil sketch of a Flower Seller in 1910.7

Ginner’s notebook records that he painted this work in 1912 and sent it to the third Camden Town Group exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in December that year (fig.5).8 A detail of one of the buses, as noted above, suggests that the summer of 1912 is the earliest it could have been painted. Since figures in the painting wear winter coats, however, the Circus was presumably seen that autumn or winter. By 1912 motor vehicles outnumbered horse-drawn vehicles in London, reversing the position of a few years earlier. The island below the Eros statue had been regularly crowded with flower-sellers, but their numbers were reduced by the arrival of motor traffic. Piccadilly Circus itself was also changing, as the first artificially lit advertisements were installed on the façade of the Pavilion Theatre in 1910, which was beside where Ginner was standing, and so not in the view he chose, and anyway not prominent during the day. In this painting Ginner was noting a contrast of old and new in London, and it is ambiguous whether his sympathies lay with the flower-seller, the modern traffic, or in the contrast itself. In 1912 traffic in central London became a subject of particular public concern. There were front-page headlines in the newspapers such as ‘Tangle of London’s Traffic | Will Proposed Board Ever Materialise | A Thorny Problem’ and ‘The Fight for London Traffic | Motor-bus Versus Tramcar | Big Developments Impending’.9

Several artists had painted Piccadilly Circus early in the century, including an impressionist view by the German painter Joseph Oppenheimer in 1900.10 Pictures of the new street lights already existed. In 1910 Muirhead Bone exhibited his drawing of Piccadilly Circus by night that he had made in 1907,11 with this note in the catalogue:

Bone’s drawing was a detailed topographical study of buildings and lighting, and shows that in 1907, just a few years before the painting by Ginner, there were no motor cars or buses (or if there were, Bone ignored them).

At the Royal Academy exhibitions in 1910–12 paintings of central London were rare, with the striking exception of an artist a generation older, Arthur Hacker (fig.6). Hacker was elected a Royal Academician in 1910 and, suddenly, having been a portrait and figure painter all his life, sent four paintings of Piccadilly Circus and the area nearby, including the interior of the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties, to the Academy for exhibition in 1911. The reason for this change of subject is not known, but the pictures are dark, Whistlerian scenes of the evening by artificial light. They may have depended on the striking effect of improved street lighting. Ginner’s kind of insistent close focus on people and their surroundings had hardly been attempted since William Logsdail’s elaborate views of Victorian London with crowds of people, including portraits of his friends, as in for example St Martin-in-the-Fields 1888 (Tate N01621, fig.7).

London as a subject for modern art had been revealed with the 1904 exhibition in Paris of Claude Monet’s recent paintings of the city.13 When the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art was published in English translation in 1908, readers of the authoritative volumes found, following his scorn for British painting, an exhortation to the modern artist to paint London not in the misty, Whistler fashion, but ‘using luminous colour to render the London atmosphere, in which the essential element is not the dust, but the colour’.14 This was in a section on Monet, which he explained was written before he had seen Monet’s series of paintings of the Thames. Admiration for these works led the same dealer who had commissioned them, Ambroise Vollard, to ask André Derain for a group of London paintings. Derain painted his during and after two visits in the winters of 1906 and 1907. Many of them are of the Thames and all are in strident fauvist colours.15 Derain’s paintings of bridges and barges were not shown prominently in Paris, but two of them, of the London Embankment and of the river with St Paul’s Cathedral,16 were displayed in the Modern French Art exhibition at the Brighton Public Art Gallery in the summer of 1910. The art critic Frank Rutter reviewed them favourably and at length in August 1910.17 There is no record of any interest Ginner had in Derain, but he knew Rutter well, and this exhibition at least gave an idea of what a modern French artist working in London could do. Along with Meier-Graefe’s suggestion, Derain’s paintings set precedents for Ginner’s use of strong colour,18 and for his central London paintings as a group (and, in the case of Victoria Embankment Gardens [Tate T03841], for one of the subjects).

There is no record of Ginner making paintings from photographs, and the art historian Malcolm Easton asserted that ‘Ginner himself never used a camera’.19 It is therefore likely that Ginner made sketches on the spot for the picture, but he must have drawn the vehicles when they were stationary. The same notebook page on which he lists the oil also cites a drawing for the painting as having been displayed at 19 Fitzroy Street and then presented to Mrs Ralph Peto for ‘Christmas-in-Wartime’.20 This may have been a charity sale, though Ginner also notes that he received £1 for it from Mrs Peto. There is a completed study for the painting, drawn on thin paper, which is almost exactly the same (fig.8). This drawing is too untidy to have been intended for exhibition, although it is signed, and is presumably the design which was transferred to the painting as there are numbered squares in the margins (in fact they are not squares but rectangles, as the drawing is more tall than wide, yet the numbers are from 1 to 15 on the sides and the top and bottom). The one difference is that in the drawing the bus at the right is a number 22, the route between Homerton and Putney. This carries different route notices from the bus in the painting, but the advertisement for the Alhambra is the same, though the canopy above the driver is different and it is not certain that it includes the new kind of box for the route number. In addition, the design is altered slightly, as Ginner made the bus in the painting almost parallel to the edges, but in the drawing it is at more of an angle. In addition to colour notes and numbers marking the squares, Ginner wrote on the drawing a sequence of numbers from 0 to 11, with also some Roman numerals and smaller numbers. The purpose of these is not known, but might be the order in which he planned to put on the colours.

On its first public showing at the third Camden Town Group exhibition in 1912, the application of paint was scathingly singled out by the Sunday Times reviewer as being the principal point of interest about the work:

The art critic of the Pall Mall Gazette thought its qualities were intentionally negative, being to convey the effect of modern traffic: ‘Piccadilly Circus both in its crude tones and jumbled composition, happily suggests the noise and confusion of that busy thoroughfare.’22

No critic at the time, so far as is known, linked the painting with the work of the Italian futurists, but this plunging into traffic and movement remained unusual for Ginner, who might have been encouraged to take it on as a response to similar futurist subjects.23 The first international futurist exhibition had travelled from the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February 1912 to the Sackville Gallery in London in March. In his notebooks Ginner listed a drawing for a large poster titled Piccadilly Circus also of 1912 as a ‘Cubist design’.24 This was one of two posters measuring 7 by 4½ feet (c.213 x 137 cm) for the Cave of the Golden Calf nightclub, both painted in ‘distemper’. The club opened in June 1912, and these were presumably large decorative pictures with lettering, and may, as the art historian Richard Cork suggests, ‘have been displayed near the entrance as an overture for the far larger decorations beyond’.25 An illustration of the poster, seen also by Malcolm Easton, was noted by the art historian Hazel Williamson.26 She describes Piccadilly Circus as ‘clearly indebted to the Futurists’ preoccupation with modernity, machinery and noise’.27 A reproduction of a poster depicting Piccadilly Circus in the French newspaper L’Actualité on 10 November 1912 is most probably Ginner’s work (fig.9).28

The notebooks show that Ginner exhibited Piccadilly Circus five times up to 1914 without finding a buyer, and eventually sold it in 1934 to T.W. Spurr.29 Spurr, an art dealer in Stockport, bought a quantity of Ginner’s work, evidently when these early paintings were unpopular and cheap, but when the artist was glad to have the money. After being sold for two guineas at Christie’s in 1938 at the lowest point of Ginner’s market, the picture was bought, unusually, by a gallery in Toronto (which later moved to Chicago) and was shown in picture galleries in department stores in Canada and America. It was effectively rediscovered at a sale at Christie’s in 1974, when the Tate Gallery tried to buy it. The reversal in the fortunes of the painting was completed when it was included in 1998 in a tour to Japan of ‘masterpieces’ from the Tate collection.