The Camden Town Group in Context

Lucien Pissarro, the son of the famous impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, was born in 1863 and lived to the age of eighty-one, dying in 1944. This photograph shows the eldery artist looking much the same as he does in a portrait by his friend James Bolivar Manson, which was painted in 1939 (now in Manchester Art Gallery). It is therefore likely that they were made around the same time. The photograph is inscribed on the reverse ‘To Lilian with love from Esther’, indicating that it was a present from Lucien’s wife Esther to Manson’s wife Lilian. James and Lilian’s marriage ended in 1938, so the photograph was probably taken shortly before that.

On the reverse of the photograph there is a stamp that states that copies can be obtained from Lafayette Ltd on New Bond Street. This photography studio was set up by James Stack Lauder (1853–1923), known professionally as James Lafayette, in Dublin in 1853 and was very successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The New Bond Street branch was opened in 1897 but the company stopped work in 1952 and finally closed in 1962.

Jane Meadows, ‘A Brief History of the Lafayette Photographic Studio’, Photographs from the Lafayette Studio, September 1990, http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1158_lafayette/back_dev.php, accessed 12 August 2011.