The Camden Town Group in Context

Walter Sickert and his wife Christine spent the summer of 1913 in Envermeu. As a break from sketching and painting in the countryside (see TGA 8120/3/53), Sickert would frequent Le Clos Normand, a restaurant and coffee-garden in the hamlet of Martin-Église run by Victor Lecourt, whom Sickert was to paint in 1921–4 (reproduced in Baron 2006, no.559). In a letter to his friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, Sickert described ‘Victor Lecourt’s coffee-garden by the stream’ as ‘an enchanting place with white tables & chairs under apple, acacia, fir & laurel trees. Of course there is a swing’ (TGA 9125/5, no.147). There are two other drawings of Le Clos Normand in Tate Archive (TGA 8120/3/24 and TGA 8210/3/52), all of which Wendy Baron notes use the same paper as The Obelisk, near Arques-la-Bataille (TGA 8120/3/53). The drawing is referenced in Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London 2006, no.436.3.