The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Mary Johanna Gore, the artist’s widow; bought at Redfern Gallery, London, 1962 by Armand Hammer (1898–1990); ... ; untraced sale, Parke Bernet, New York, late 1960s, bought by Mr and Mrs Robert Lewin; presented by Mr and Mrs Lewin through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1978.

A Singer at the Bedford Music Hall is painted on stretched primed canvas. The cloth is linen with a simple twill weave that produces a pattern of diagonal ribs. It has been prepared with glue size, most of which seems to have been absorbed into the cloth, and a dense white priming composed mostly of lead white but with some chalk and/or gypsum, probably bound in oil. Priming extends to the cut edges of the canvas and conforms to the weave texture.

Faint traces of squaring-up used to transfer the image from a drawing are visible at the edges, where the paint has been thinly applied. The outline of the composition was then roughed in using thinned dark blue underpaint, deliberately left visible in areas. This technique is common to nearly all of Gore’s works in the Tate collection and seems to be a standard part of his practice.1 Drawing in thinned blue and sometimes black paint was a distinctive feature of post-impressionist painting, which was recognised at the time and has since been emphasised in technical studies.2 It has also been identified in the work of Robert Bevan and Charles Ginner (see Tate N05911, N04750, T00282), but is largely absent in that of Harold Gilman and Walter Sickert, who were critical of the practice.3

The painting was swiftly executed, leaving exposed areas of priming notably towards the edges. The contrasting areas of stage and backdrop created by the spotlight are broadly laid in using a stiff brush and thin blue, purple and greenish yellow paints. The way in which the paint is lifted from the brush by the canvas emphasises the diagonal texture of the canvas weave. Areas of blue drawing were then reinstated and modified while still wet, picking up and mixing adjacent areas of colour, as where the yellow is dragged through the blue towards the top right. These areas were reinforced and modified with brighter opaque lilac and yellow paints to refine the colour and define the strong form of the singer and her shadow. Equally they are vigorously executed with more intricate and dense layering of predominantly slick opaque colours applied wet-in-wet. As in the background, outlines of the figure are retained and reinstated. Modifications, such as the repositioning of the left arm and right hand gesture, were made quickly allowing the flesh and blue colours to mix. The painting is unvarnished.

A label on the stretcher is inscribed in ink by Harold Gilman: ‘Painted by S.F. Gore in 1912. It is painted | from one drawing done in the Bedford music | Hall. | (a) (147)’. The reverse of the canvas has been inscribed in white chalk ‘147 59 113’, which, because of its first number, is probably by Gilman too. After Gore’s death, Gilman went through his studio and numbered the canvases on their reverse in what he believed was their order of execution, adding ‘(a)’ to those he believed to be of special interest or value.

The Bedford Music Hall was at 93–95 Camden High Street, just a few minutes’ walk from Gore’s flat in Houghton Place (figs.1 and 2).1 The original Bedford Music Hall opened in 1861, but burnt down in 1896. A very popular venue, it was rebuilt and opened as the Beford Palace of Varieties on 6 February 1899. The interior was designed in an ebullient neo-baroque style, opulently gilded, and decorated with plaster caryatids and putti and red velvet hangings. It could hold 1,100 people.2 The theatre attracted some of the most famous music-hall artists of the day, including Marie Lloyd, Little Tich and Charles Coburn, with his famous songs The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and Two Lovely Black Eyes . In 1912 both the actor Charlie Chaplin and singer Gracie Fields appeared there.3

Music halls were still extremely popular, but were facing competition from other sources of mass entertainment, notably the new phenomenon of the picture palace. Music halls were expensive and therefore sometimes risky businesses to run. In 1911 there was a meeting of the creditors of Benjamin Pearce Lucas of 80 Arlington Road, Regent’s Park, the one-time owner of the Bedford. It was reported in the Times that:

In 1908 Lucas had tried to block the opening of the grand Camden Town Palace at Mornington Crescent. He lodged a complaint at the licence hearing that ‘the locality was already amply provided with music halls ... and ... that the setting up of this new music hall would be unfair trade competition and that it was not needed in the neighbourhood’.5 The London County Council granted the Palace its licence ‘on condition that no intoxicating liquor was sold or consumed on the premises’.6

Sickert had painted the original ‘Old Bedford’ theatre and, from 1908, he made a series of pictures of the rebuilt music-hall interior and its audience, including The New Bedford (Tate N06174). Gore made his earliest known picture of the Bedford in 1907,7 which depicts a singer on the stage treated in a similarly simplified manner to the Tate picture. It is tempting to speculate whether Gore and Sickert attended performances there together around 1907–8.

In A Singer at the Bedford Music Hall the figure has a strangely contorted facial expression. This may be because she is winking at the audience, perhaps during the kind of song that contained the double entendres which were so popular in the music halls of the period. The stylisation of the figure would appear to derive from the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin, although the commitment to a theatrical subject is entirely characteristic of Gore.

The singer has been identified by Max Tyler, the Historian of the British Music Hall Society, as Florrie Forde (1876–1940, fig.3).8 Born in Melbourne, Forde was an immensely popular and successful performer who debuted on the London stage in 1897. She was known for ‘chorus songs’, that is songs where she would invite the audience to sing along with her during the chorus. Among Forde’s most famous songs were Hold Your Hand out Naughty Boy, Down at the Old Bull and Bush, Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly and Oh Oh Antonio. During the First World War she entertained the troops and theatres with It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty and Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag. Forde introduced over six hundred songs in all, and most of these were published; the sale of the sheet music was extremely lucrative. She paid to secure sole theatre performance rights for many songs which became her trademarks.9