The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1923 by a body of Subscribers and presented to Tate Gallery.

Michaelmas Daisies is painted in artists’ oil paints on a pre-primed and stretched canvas, supplied by the London artists’ colourmen Newman of Soho Square. The canvas is linen and has an uneven, plain weave and has been sized and prepared with white, probably oil-based priming. The support retains its original stretching with coated-steel tacks onto a four-member pine stretcher with mortise and tenon expansion joints.

Manson initially drew in the main compositional elements in thinned blue paint, which is visible at the edges of the earthenware vase. This type of underdrawing is also found in other works (see Tate N04929). The background and table are summarily laid in with fairly liquid colours, leaving areas of the priming exposed. The main body of flowers is painted directly on to the priming whereas peripheral blooms are laid over the dark background. The painting of the flowers is executed with great attention to detail, with small impasto brushstrokes producing a complex pattern of interwoven colours. The vibrancy of the colouring is enhanced by the lively wet-in-wet application and contrasting use of the canvas texture in deft scumbled touches. The colours are predominantly opaque mixtures but use is made of a dark Prussian blue and alizarin crimson-coloured glazes. The surface has been coated with a thin even layer of soft resin varnish to saturate the colours and enhance the contrast between the dark background and the bright colours of the flowers.

In his introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition held to mark J.B. Manson’s death, R.R. Tatlock drew attention to his friend’s fascination with the beauty of nature:

This enjoyment of the simple pleasures of nature perhaps explains Manson’s commitment to painting flower pictures, a long and numerous series painted over a period of more than thirty years.

Manson’s exhibition of flower pictures at the Leicester Galleries in 1923 attracted little critical attention. It was reviewed briefly and not wholly positively in the Times:

This observation holds some truth, but it is perhaps more the case that Manson did not intend such paintings to serve as botanical illustrations. Rather they were examples of his belief in impressionist principles, painting simple objects pleasing to the eye in a style adapted from Claude Monet and Lucien and Camille Pissarro. Unlike the classic type of Dutch seventeenth-century flower pictures, Manson always included details of the household setting in which he painted his flowers, essentially creating a form of domestic still life. As he stated in an interview in the Daily Herald in 1930:

When Michaelmas Daisies was included in Manson’s 1973 retrospective exhibition at the Maltzahn Gallery, William Gaunt wrote in the Times that is was ‘for a long time reported to be the most popular of the Tate’s series of postcard colour prints’.4