The Camden Town Group in Context

Acquired from the artist by Miss Hilda Trevelyan, from whom purchased by Tate Gallery 1938.

Jacques-Émile Blanche is painted on a relatively coarse canvas that was purchased in France. The canvas has been stretched by the artist onto a four-member stretcher with the stretcher back to front. It may have been sized but appears to have no commercial priming. Instead, Sickert has applied at least two layers of dull grey oil paint, consisting of lead white, chalk and bone black, across the front surface of the canvas to act as an optical ground. There is no visible evidence of drawing. The composition is brushed in black paint and toned with reds, blacks, browns and greys, and then details were applied with thicker impasto by dabbing the paint onto the canvas with a loaded brush. Sickert then brushed broken dabs and broader strokes of paint to depict impressions of the forms. Strong orange and reds are evident with some green, but otherwise blacks and greys dominate and the general tones of the colours are lowered by painting over a grey ground. The artist’s palette contained Indian red, Mars brown, a yellow, lead white, bone black and ultramarine and the complex mix of pigments suggests considerable mixing on the palette before painting. The painting is varnished, but this appears to have been applied later since it has penetrated cracks to the reverse of the canvas; it is not known whether an earlier varnish was originally applied by the artist.

Born in Paris, the son of a society neurologist, Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942) was a French painter of portraits and landscapes. He enjoyed fashionable success during his lifetime. From 1884 he visited England almost every year, where he regularly submitted work for exhibition. Blanche’s parents kept a house at Dieppe which was a centre for the town’s social scene, as was Blanche’s studio there at Le Bas Fort Blanc. In Dieppe in the mid-1880s Blanche encountered a cross-section of artists and cultural critics, including George Moore, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Conder, as well as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Helleu and André Gide.1 When he visited Dieppe in 1885 Walter Sickert visited Blanche, although it seems likely they had met for the first time earlier the same year in London. Blanche’s memoirs suggest this first meeting took place when he visited his friend, Mrs Edwin Edwards, who with her husband was on friendly terms with the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Sickert had been dispatched there by Whistler to try to persuade Fantin-Latour to visit the American artist’s studio.2 It was in Blanche’s Dieppe house in 1885 that Sickert refreshed his acquaintance with Degas.3

Sickert and Blanche became close friends at this time, and the art historian Wendy Baron has written:

In 1909 Sickert wrote to Mrs Hammersley, the wife of one of his patrons, making plain his feelings about Blanche:

But Blanche appears to have been central to Sickert’s early success. He used his influence with the Paris dealers Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune to get them to exhibit Sickert’s work, and obtained commissions for him from private clients and election to the Salon d’Automne. He purchased a large number of Sickert’s paintings himself, far more than any other single owner, and through such generosity was evidently deliberately subsidising his friend. Many of these pictures were given away to friends, and the large number remaining was bequeathed to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.6

Blanche painted Sickert a number of times, notably the picture from 1898 that is in the National Portrait Gallery.7 The Tate portrait of Blanche, however, appears to be the only painting Sickert made of his friend, although he made a pen and ink drawing in 1890 that was published in the Whirlwind.8 According to Sickert’s student and biographer Robert Emmons, the Tate portrait was painted at Rowlandson House which Sickert rented in about 1910 (see Tate N05088).9 However, when it was reproduced in Blanche’s autobiography Portraits of a Lifetime (1937), he himself gave it the date 1906, which would preclude it from having been made in Rowlandson House. That it was painted in a studio is confirmed by the presence of a stretched canvas, with its back facing outwards, glimpsed behind Blanche’s shoulders. Blanche may perhaps have misremembered the date, but it has also been said that the portrait was made to celebrate his election to a gentlemen’s club in St James’s.10

Baron formerly dated the portrait to 1910 in support of Emmons, but now believes it more likely to be from 1906 on stylistic grounds because of the pointillist manner in which the face is painted and the touches of pure colour which have resonance with another picture of that year, The Studio: The Painting of a Nude (fig.1).11 The cooling of Sickert’s feelings towards Blanche would also tend to support an earlier dating.

With its Whistlerian lack of foreground and placing of the figure against a wall Sickert creates a very direct confrontation with the sitter. Blanche immediately becomes part of the viewer’s space, and there is no recession or perspective in the composition. His dress is that of a gentleman about town – the combination of overcoat, white scarf and silk hat denoting a man of social standing and position. Like Sickert, Blanche enjoyed the creativity or dandyism that different clothing allowed. Here his conservative costume is partly an assertion that the painter is suited to the higher echelons of social position, but this was of course the position Blanche actually held. His father, Émile, was a noted and fashionable neural specialist, whose large clinic and grounds at Auteuil were painted by Sickert as L’Hotel de Lamballe, La Maison de Dr Blanche (private collection).12 However, Blanche’s wearing of a hat indoors, tipped back slightly on his head, strikes a note of bohemian unconventionality, at odds with the conservatism of the portrait’s ‘head and shoulders’ format.

The first owner of the portrait was Hildegard ‘Hilda’ Trevelyan (died 1948), daughter of the baronet Sir Alfred William Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, a descendent of the nineteenth-century historian George Trevelyan. An amateur painter, she was a close friend of Blanche, and also of Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, and through them would have been on familiar terms with Sickert.13