The Camden Town Group in Context

At first sight, the down-at-heel streets of turn-of-the-century north London that formed the setting for the formation of the Camden Town Group offer little inspiration to the dress historian seeking evidence of an engagement with themes of fashionability in the paintings of Walter Sickert, Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and their associates. Camden’s plain-fronted housing stock and its broad but unexceptional main thoroughfare had been planned in the early nineteenth century as a service zone for the more prestigious aristocratic terraces of nearby Regent’s Park. The railway boom that followed the opening of Euston Station in 1838, rather than bringing prosperity, imposed a blight on the district that would endure almost to the end of the twentieth century. Residential and commercial property was threatened and obliterated by the building of lines leading to King’s Cross and St Pancras, and those large villas that did survive were broken up into lodging rooms for a transient population of building labourers and navvies. The canal system that bisected the rail tracks also created a grimy hinterland of wharves, warehouses, factories and stables that further disturbed any semblance of glamour or respectability. By 1913 the writer Compton Mackenzie was able to capitalise on the depressed reputation of the district in the lurid descriptions of inner-city seediness that pepper his novel Sinister Street:

It was, however, precisely this atmosphere of banal degradation that attracted a generation of artists who sought in London’s inner suburban backwaters an alienating modernity equal to anything on offer in the competing capitals of continental Europe. In this spirit, Sickert had moved to Mornington Crescent in 1905, his choice of residence vindicating his friend William Rothenstein’s recollection that ‘Walter Sickert’s genius for discovering the dreariest house and the most forbidding rooms in which to work was a source of wonder and amusement to me. He himself was so fastidious in his person, in his manners, in the choice of his clothes; was he affecting a kind of dandyism “a rebours”?’2

Here then was a contradiction: the urbane dandy finding inspiration in the abject ennui of the everyday. Certainly the murder of part-time prostitute Emily Dimmock in St Paul’s Road, Camden Town, during the late summer of 1907 seemed to seal the notoriety of the district, arousing significant tabloid interest and providing Sickert with the subject matter of several canvases. The double life of the victim, who passed in the daytime as the law-abiding wife of a railway cook, and the fact that the main suspect in the case enjoyed an upstanding career as a commercial artist, heightened the bathos of a case that would find echoes in the subsequent arrest of patent medicine salesman Dr Crippen for the murder of his wife Cora, a retired music hall performer at their home in nearby Hilldrop Crescent in 1910.

In the popular imagination, Camden Town thus became intimately linked with the perversity and horror that seeped up from beneath the surfaces of contemporary urban life. But through the recording of these everyday scenes in the work of the Camden Town Group and their subsequent interpretation we are also able to reconcile the seemingly opposed positions of fashionable dandy and the chronicling of banality, producing a surprisingly radical reading of early twentieth-century popular and sartorial culture in the process. At second sight, in other words, Camden Town Group paintings offer a highly prescient insight into the changed nature of London’s fashion scenes in the early twentieth century.

Of course, not all Camden Town Group painters chose to limit their vision to the shabby rented rooms lining Camden High Street. Ginner, for example, in his paintings of The Café Royal (Tate N05050, fig.1) and Piccadilly Circus (Tate T03096, fig.2) of 1911 and 1912, evokes the festive atmosphere of metropolitan modernity that defined the West End of London as a newly confident space for sophisticated discourse and fashionable engagement. Here was a city of spruce clerks and emancipated stenographers, energetic New Women, elegant actresses, bohemians and dapper men-about-town in which the glittering and ever-changing surfaces of life marked London out as an enterprising locus for commerce and consumption. London writer Thomas Burke credited the change to the influence of Chicago and New York, noticing a ‘London that was going ahead. American ideas and ways of life had been infecting it for some time, and where it had been rich and fruity it was becoming slick and snappy.’3 Similarly, the fashion journalist Mrs E.T. Cook recorded both a growing addiction to the pursuit of shopping and a corresponding improvement in the built environment as she passed through the centre of town:

The frenetic pace with which fashionable modernity was pursued came at a price, however, and the vibrant promotional energy captured in Ginner’s Piccadilly Circus finds a parallel in his later The Dressmaking Factory of c.1914 (fig.3). Here the technology and coordinated labour necessary to produce the modish items that brought shoppers to the West End captures the painter’s imagination. The 1909 Trade Board Act that followed years of campaigning by the anti-sweating league and high-profile events such as the Daily News Sweated Industries Exhibition held at Langham Place in 1906 had effected positive changes in the organisation of the British garment industries in the decades before the First World War.5 The introduction of a minimum wage and the establishment of trade schools did much to ameliorate the exploitative practices and unhealthy conditions that had attended the making of clothes in the nineteenth century, and Ginner’s composition certainly depicts a more harmonious and productive environment than forbears such as Richard Redgrave recorded.

Nevertheless, though Ginner’s vision of fashionable urban modernity is generally a positive one, the tensions that underlay a supposed democratisation of glamour and the psychological hollowness that sometimes accompanied the drive to acquisition are captured in the nuanced portraits of working class north London women produced by other artists of the Camden Town Group.

Gore’s North London Girl (Tate T00027, fig.4) of c.1911–12 is an evocatively dispassionate record of the appearance and demeanor of the cleaner and charlady who serviced the studio in Fitzroy Street. Gore had stressed that ‘it’s not the business of the painter to dress his sitter to show his taste in dress, but to have them in clothes naturally characteristic of them’.6 Here the smartly trimmed bonnet, blue-frilled blouse and casually opened raincoat are a faithful rendering of a costume that is up-to-date but also resignedly in tune with the quieter patterns of local tastes and expectations.

Sickert’s L’Américaine (Tate N05090, fig.5), painted three years previously, makes a similar play on the apparent disconnect between the rhetoric of West End extravagance and more quotidian concerns. This coster-girl sports the wide straw boater (known colloquially as an ‘American Sailor’) that enjoyed popularity both as a flamboyant accessory of young East End working women and the badge of progressive liberal femininity adopted by the New Woman on her bicycle or the Suffragette at her protests. A typical example survives in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig.6). In Sickert’s rendering, the outsized tilted hat and coy gesture of the sitter play simultaneously to standard representations of ‘cockney’ social types, the simpering actress pose of the Edwardian theatrical postcard and the presentational gesture of contemporary fashion advertising. The fractured nature of metropolitan subjectivity is thus suggested with great subtlety.

Men of all social ranks were no less affected by London’s evolving fashion scene. As the City developed to become the engine of imperialist expansion from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the urban landscape came to be populated by those officials, administrators, clerks and tradesmen whose labour was necessary for the smooth running of the Empire, and their physical appearance is as evident in Camden Town Group paintings as the more obvious traces of feminine fashionability. Indeed, the quotidian and uniform presence of seemingly conservatively dressed working men was arguably even more representative of the rhythms of modern London life than the glamorous sheen of the West End café or shopping street.

Robert Bevan’s Horse Sale at the Barbican (Tate N04750, fig.7) of 1912, with its ranks of bowler-hatted and flat-capped bystanders, white-jacketed horse handlers and breeched equestrians, provides a remarkably variegated overview of the nuanced tones and values of masculine dressing. The location of the sale on the north-east side of the City afforded a more mixed clientele than the aristocratic business of Tattersall’s, London’s more famous horse auction house based in Knightsbridge. The proximity in Bevan’s painting of office boy and gent brings to mind Percy Fitzgerald’s description of East End ‘style’, published in his account of music hall culture of 1890:

The fascination of Camden Town Group artists with contemporary, largely working class, urban types is complemented by their more personal portrayals of wives, lovers and friends. These provided occasions for the rendering of a more bohemian style of dressing, completely at odds with the glitter of music hall costume or the humdrum practicality of working wardrobes.

Tate cataloguer Nicola Moorby notes that Gore’s 1913 portrait of his wife (Tate T03561, fig.8) shows her in

This exoticism was also, however, as local in nature as the resigned attempts of the charlady to look smart and up to date. Gore and his peers were adept in capturing a very distinctive London mode of ‘artistic’ fashion that stood in opposition to Parisian notions of elegance and had its roots in the rational dress of the Arts and Crafts generation, found aristocratic expression in the clothing styles of women attached to the Bloomsbury Group, and was reflected more broadly in the stock of the department stores, specialist shops and antique markets of Kensington, Chelsea and other ‘bohemian’ districts (figs.9 and 10).9

The Camden Town Group’s interest in this close relationship between the everyday surfaces of contemporary life, the avant-garde sensibility and the propensity of fashion culture and urban living to define notions of time, taste and place is further captured in Malcolm Drummond’s Girl with Palmettes of c.1914 (Tate T00893, fig.11). Here the strikingly direct gaze of the emancipated modern woman in her chic ensemble of soft broad-brimmed hat and stylishly trimmed, tailored suit seems to take us forward into the 1920s, to the democratic, open values of inter-war Britain.10