The Camden Town Group in Context

Acquired from the artist by Philip Wilson Steer (1960–1942), by whom given to the Contemporary Art Society c.1911; presented to Tate Gallery 1917.

George Moore is painted on a stretched canvas that at some point during its history was lined, presumably because the original support had deteriorated in condition. The canvas was probably sized but does not appear to have been primed; instead, the artist applied a layer of brown-coloured oil paint directly onto the cloth, to act as an optical ground. Working on an unprimed surface also had several advantages as some of the oil paint would have absorbed into the canvas, affecting the drying, so that Sickert could work quicker and maintain the impression of a lean surface that had not been overworked.

Sickert probably began by blocking in the background first in a fluid dark green paint leaving an area of reserve for the portrait. He built up the sitter’s face by applying patches of flesh-coloured paint leaving the optical ground exposed to function as a mid-tone. The portrait was probably worked in several stages, allowing the paint to dry before applying final fluid strokes in an impressionist style building to a low impasto in areas such as the brow and cheeks. The sitter’s jacket appears to have been blocked in black paint, leaving an area of reserve for his necktie and collar, which were later worked in a few economical brushstrokes over the lean dried paint, at which time the jacket may also have been repainted.

The background was repainted in the later stages to redefine the boundaries of the portrait, and the form of the sitter’s head was then adjusted by applying a more opaque paint with white admixture around the back of the head in the same colour as the background. The painting was probably originally varnished by the artist but may have been subsequently re-varnished to improve the saturation of the dark colours.

George Augustus Moore (1852–1933) was born at Moore Hall, Lough Carra, County Mayo, Ireland. His father, George Henry Moore (1810–1870), was a gentleman horse breeder and Member of Parliament. While the family were living in London, George Moore decided he wanted an artistic career and so enrolled as an art student in 1868, a move bitterly opposed by his parents who wanted him to join the army. The early death of Moore’s father in 1870 allowed him freedom to follow his desire, as well as the income from the family estate in Ireland.

Moore went to Paris in 1873 and enrolled first at the École des Beaux-Arts, and then at various private schools and ateliers. Realising his artistic abilities were slight, he instead turned to a literary career, and drew particular inspiration from the Nouvelle Athènes, a café frequented by artists and writers. There he met Émile Zola, who encouraged him to become a writer. During these years in Paris, Moore became friends with Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, the latter making a portrait of him (fig.1), and he was also on intimate terms with the symbolist writers Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Paul Verlaine.1

Moore returned to London in 1880, producing a series of novels, including the famous Esther Waters (1894), while also turning his attention to writing on art.2 As art critic of the Speaker he championed Manet and Degas, and modern French art as a whole. When he moved to the Saturday Review, Moore nominated Walter Sickert to replace him. In 1891 Moore published Impressions and Opinions, which included colourful essays on Zola, Verlaine, Honoré de Balzac, Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue, while his 1893 Modern Painting established him as the chief apologist for new developments in art. In this period his and Sickert’s views on art almost exactly coincided.

Sickert and Moore first met in Dieppe, an occasion Moore recalled with Proustian intensity even decades later:

That Sickert should paint a portrait of a friend who shared his artistic beliefs is not surprising. But it must be that he also intended to raise and commemorate the status of Moore as a critic and supporter of new British art, and by implication his own status as an artist. It is difficult not to see such a work as reinforcing a tribal sense of belonging to a defined avant-garde group in the British art world. That Sickert’s George Moore was first shown at the 1891 exhibition of the New English Art Club – in which Sickert was a leading member of a hard-line impressionist faction which Moore had defended in print – would seem to confirm the portrait as part of Sickert’s campaign. It may have been seen as a provocation by more conservative critics, and also elements of the New English Art Club itself. Stanhope Forbes, for instance, had been a founder of the NEAC, but bitterly tried to resist the more authentically impressionist direction in which Sickert and Steer tried to take the group. He effectively withdrew from the debate when he became an Associate Royal Academician in 1892. The potential of Moore’s portrait to irritate conservative elements is borne out by Robert Emmons’s recollection that at the annual Royal Academy banquet, presumably during the speeches, it was derided as an ‘intoxicated mummy’,4 reputedly by Henry Butcher.5

Further evidence that Sickert was using such pictures to elevate the status of the new art protagonists is that in 1890, the year before he exhibited George Moore, he and Steer each painted a portrait of one another and showed them at the New English Art Club spring exhibition (Sickert’s portrait of Steer is now in the National Portrait Gallery,6 while Steer’s painting of Sickert is now lost).7 Indeed, the Umpire complained:

Around the time he exhibited George Moore, Sickert was heavily engaged in the discipline of making portrait studies. In 1890 he was commissioned to make a series of drawings from life of familiar society figures for full-page reproduction in the short-lived weekly journal the Whirlwind. He submitted an illustration each week, and the diverse figures that he represented included Jacques-Emile Blanche, Charles Bradlaugh, Henry Labouchere, Lord Lytton and Sir Charles Rivers Wilson.9 In 1893 the Pall Mall Budget reprinted three drawings from the Whirlwind series, and also others probably drawn in 1890 that included Lord Curzon, Hippolyte Taine and Professor Dewar.

In the 1890s celebrity was big business. Britain was a society dominated by mass production and the beginnings of a collective mass culture, one effect of which was the celebration of individuality and fame. People hungrily consumed images of their heroes in newspapers and journals, searching for the physiognomy of genius. The refinement of printing technology in the 1890s allowed artists’ drawings to be reproduced through photographic processes. Images of the great and the good were commissioned from artists, often with the belief that greater revelation of character would come through their perceptive translation than through a photograph. Series such as William Rothenstein’s English Portraits or William Nicholson’s Twelve Portraits, both published in 1897, were eagerly consumed and sold in large numbers.

Sickert’s head and shoulders drawing in pen and ink of George Moore appeared in the Pall Mall Budget on 23 February 1893, and a three-quarter-length drawing was reproduced in the Cambridge Observer, edited by his brother Oswald, on 28 February 1893. As the art historian Wendy Baron has suggested, it seems possible that both these drawings were done in 1890, at the same time Sickert was working on his oil portrait, although neither is a study for it.10 In his review of Sickert’s essay ‘Realism in Painting’, Moore wrote of his experience of being painted by Sickert, and related it to the argument of Sickert’s article:

The portrait of Moore attracted considerable and extensive attention in the press, some favourable and some heavily critical. The Yorkshire Post described it as ‘an astonishing portrait ... which it is impossible to believe is seriously intended’,12 while the Liverpool Mercury noted, ‘Mr Walter Sickert has painted Mr George Moore in somewhat eccentric style’. ¹³ Other reviewers responded to what they believed was the impressionist technique Sickert employed, and thought it looked better viewed from further away:

The Times judged this technique less praiseworthy:

The Echo took up this point, but defended Sickert’s ability to capture Moore’s character:

Several newspapers suspected Sickert had painted something that deliberately bordered on parody. The Pall Mall Gazette wrote of it as ‘a portrait as might be said by some to approach a caricature of the sitter’s genial features; but there is no denying the vividness of the impression conveyed’,17 while the Birmingham Post thought Moore ‘must feel but slightly flattered by the portrait ... which occupies a central position in the gallery’.18 The critic of the Herald poked fun at both Sickert’s abilities as a portraitist and Moore’s advocacy of French naturalist literature:

The idea that the picture was some sort of caricature was pursued in a number of notices. The Echo critic wrote how they

Perhaps because of its notoriety or celebrity, Sickert is said to have placed a price on the portrait of a hundred guineas when it was exhibited in 1891.21 While critical reactions were distinctly mixed, most commentated upon the work’s ability to express a distinct character. D.S. MacColl in the Spectator wrote most favourably:

Moore was certainly a man of singular and characterful appearance, to which his obituary in the Times drew attention:

Moore’s own reactions to his portrait were not voiced publicly until 20 February 1892, when in the Speaker he pronounced himself satisfied. But the lapse in time before mentioning it in print adds credence to the story that he was privately very annoyed by the picture. According to James Laver, when he first saw the picture he exploded, ‘You have made me look like a booby!’ Sickert is reputed to have responded, ‘But you are a booby’.24

The beginnings of the waning of Sickert’s admiration for Moore might be seen in the caricature he published of him in Vanity Fair in 1897, which he titled Esther Waters, the same as the eponymous servant heroine of Moore’s most famous novel, who endured unmarried pregnancy and hardship.25 Robert Emmons wrote that ‘To Sickert, Moore was always a subject of gay derision. His pronouncements on painting were reassured as delicious titbits of the sublimely ridiculous.’26 After Moore published Conversations in Ebury Street in 1924, which contained a chapter about the painter, ‘Sickert never forgave him’ and considered the text ‘only just short of actionable’.27

Robert Emmons said Sickert wrote to Steer requesting George Moore for his December 1900 solo exhibition held at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris, where he was with Moore: ‘Send me George Moore’s portrait for my exhibition,’ Sickert wrote, ‘I will take care of it and send it back promptly. Send it quickly.’28 Although it is not listed as being included in the show, it at least indicates that by 1900 Steer was already in possession of the picture, and it might be supposed he obtained it from Sickert some time following the 1892 New English Art Club exhibition. Emmons added that ‘Sickert had a particular admiration and affection for Steer ... It was a great pleasure to him when Steer later gave his portrait of George Moore to the Tate, thus linking their names together forever.’29

The impetus behind the gift – which was through the Contemporary Art Society, formed in 1910 – appears to have been the critic D.S. MacColl, who recalled the portrait being on Sickert’s easel when he first visited him in 1891. ‘I prevented him from spoiling it,’ MacColl recalled, ‘and had that personal reason, as well as its merit, for wishing to secure it for the Tate Gallery.’30 MacColl reprinted a letter from Sickert to Steer about the gift through the Contemporary Art Society:

MacColl incorrectly dates this letter to 1917. But Steer was reported to have already presented the picture to the Contemporary Art Society in the 1912 edition of This Year’s Art,32 suggesting that he donated it sometime between that date and the Society’s formation in 1910. In a letter to his friends Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands, that may date from December 1910, Sickert himself wrote:

This last comment is intriguing as it not only suggests Sickert expected to gain payment by some means, but appears to raise the possibility that although the picture was in Steer’s possession it still belonged to Sickert in some way, so that he could expect payment.

In 1973 Sotheby’s sold a picture by Sickert they titled Portrait of a Man with a Moustache, called George Moore c.1896–8 (private collection),35 but which may perhaps depict the painter Theodore Roussel.