The Camden Town Group in Context

Goupil Gallery, London; sold Christie’s, London, 28 January 1927 (148); Mark Oliver, sold Sotheby’s, London, 29 November 1944 (129); sold Tooth, London; Hart and Massey, London; sold Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London, 1959; Peter Shand-Kydd 1960; Mrs Janet Shand-Kydd, from whom bought through Browse & Darby, London, by Tate Gallery 1983.

Walter Sickert purchased a pre-primed canvas from the London artists’ colourmen Percy Young, whose faded stamp marks the back of the canvas and is also impressed into one of the stretcher bars. The cloth is coarse-textured hemp; on its back is a circular ink stamp, which may be a canvas batch number or customs stamp suggesting that the cloth was imported.

The canvas has been sized and fully primed with a layer of gypsum and zinc white followed by a thin opaque layer of lead white and chalk.1 The primer extends to the turnover edges and retains much of the rough canvas-weave texture. Sickert loosely brushed on a thin mid-grey layer over the commercial priming to function as an optical ground. There is no visible evidence of any preliminary drawing or squaring-up on the primed canvas, but there are evenly spaced pinholes on both vertical edges that are positioned parallel on either side and some more randomly positioned along the horizontal edges, which may relate to a method of measuring or marking out the canvas with threads stretched across the face.

The artist started painting by blocking in the main compositional forms in relatively opaque patches of brown, green and grey colours in muted tones applied directly onto the optical ground. This would have been allowed to dry before further blocks of solid colour were applied using the same muted tones to define and redefine formal and spatial boundaries. The grey ground, left exposed or overlaid in parts, functioned as a neutral mid-tone and maintained a tonal balance: it can be seen in the bridge of her nose and the sockets of her eyes and in the bedclothes, for example. The composition was built up in this way in several stages over the dried ground, abstracting form and playing with positive and negative space; for example, the shoulder and right breast of the figure have been overpainted in the later stages of painting in the same green as the background to depict the right side of the figure’s torso in shadow. The main composition does not appear to have been modified during painting, except for a slight reduction in the length of the figure’s toe.

The final stages of painting were worked quickly and vigorously in a brighter key, the artist applying fluid impasto, rough scumbles and brief linear strokes to introduce touches of detail and colour with some wet-in-wet working. The work was probably carried out in Sickert’s studio using a posed model and worked over several sittings. While it retains the freshness of painting from life, reinforced in the final stages of painting, the subject is contrived and is not as momentary as it appears. The painting was probably originally varnished but has been cleaned and revarnished during its history due to discolouration of the original varnish.

If there is one physical object which characterises Walter Sickert’s art, it is the iron bedstead which formed the centrepiece of numerous figure studies painted in London during the period 1905–9. This lowly piece of domestic furniture became the artist’s trademark, synonymous with both the subject matter and ethos of his paintings. His friend and model Cicely Hey, for example, described herself as the ‘last occupant’ of the iron bedstead,1 while the artist Diana White ironically asked Sickert if her niece, Regina Middleton, was required to buy one in order to become his pupil.2

The bed served a dual purpose as prop. Sickert organised his studio models in a series of poses based around the bed which allowed him to explore different figurative arrangements within an intimate environment. The physical appearance of the iron bedstead, however, was also important. It became symbolic of the social subjects Sickert sought to portray in his work, being functional and hard-wearing but also cheap and unrefined. It served as a metaphor for the urban working classes and the dingy London interiors – so beloved by the artist – which they inhabited. The iron bedstead appears principally in a number of pictures of the female nude from 1905–6, which later culminated in a series of works from 1908–9 known as the Camden Town Murder paintings.

The painting shows a female nude half-lying and half-seated upon a bed covered in white sheets with one leg crossed over the other and her left hand pushing down behind her, almost as though she is in the process of getting up. The bed has been positioned face-on with the legs cut off by the bottom of the picture so that the viewer seems to be standing at its foot looking down upon the woman. There is a strong suggested light source to her left which illuminates the nearest planes of her body and casts the right-hand side of her face and torso into deep shadow. Little detail is discernible about the rest of the room apart from a partial view of a large mirror on the wall behind, in which can be seen a reflection. The art historian Wendy Baron has identified a related drawing in charcoal, graphite and chalk in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.3 In this drawing a nude of the same appearance and build is fully reclined on the bed with her right arm raised behind her head and her right leg thrown across the left, in the opposite direction to the painting. It is perhaps more closely related to another oil of the same period, Nuit d’été c.1906 (fig.1),4 which seems to show the same room as La Hollandaise. The same iron bedstead also appears in other drawings and paintings including Le Lit de fer c.1905 (private collection)5 and The Iron Bedstead c.1906 (The Earl and Countess of Harewood).6

No other painting seems to so readily bring to mind Sickert’s famous utterance that ‘the plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts’.7 There is no idealisation of the naked body. Rather, Sickert seems to revel in the model’s heavy form and unflattering arrangement of limbs. He makes no attempt to accommodate his technique in deference to the portrayal of flesh, but instead uses broad but controlled brushstrokes and livid patches of colour to emphasise the materiality of the painted surface. Consequently, some commentators have found his treatment of the figure disturbing, akin to a violation of the body. The diagonal streaks of paint on the thigh, for example, have been associated with a violent, misogynistic approach, while the use of various colours such as blue, olive green and grey can be suggestive of the discolouration of bruising.8 The art historian Rebecca Daniels has suggested that the triangular blank spaces of her face are indicative of the degenerative cavities created by tertiary syphilis.9

It is this absence of facial features which is particularly disquieting for the viewer. In the classical tradition of painting the female nude by artists such as Titian or Velázquez, the coy or deflected glance of the model, and the sense of an appropriate imagined setting and guise were key to the acceptability of looking at a naked woman. These conditions were altered, with explosive results, by Edouard Manet in Olympia 1863 (fig.2), where the sitter was recognisable as a contemporary prostitute who challenged the viewer with her direct and uncompromising gaze. Here the tradition is further problematised by Sickert. Like Olympia, ‘La Hollandaise’ is clearly not a fictitious character, but a ‘real’, modern woman who reclines on a bed with rumpled sheets, creating a sense of sordid disorder. Sickert has, however, removed the gaze of the model altogether by obliterating the details of the face, while, nevertheless, retaining the impression that she is looking out at the viewer. The impact of staring at this nameless, faceless woman has therefore struck many viewers as unsettling. The art historian Anna Gruetzner Robins has equated the distorted treatment of the body and its attendant connotations of prostitution and degeneracy with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York).10

As with much of Sickert’s work it is not entirely clear what effect the artist intended to create. When viewed in the context of Sickert’s views on the nude, the treatment of the body in La Hollandaise can be read, not as disturbing, but as painterly. In Sickert’s opinion paintings should always show ‘someone, somewhere’.11 He firmly outlined his beliefs in an article in the New Age, July 1910, entitled ‘The naked and the Nude’, in which he condemned art school practice which taught students to draw idealised, ‘lifeless’ nudes without reference to the real world. Instead, he articulated, the focus should be placed on drawing the clothed figure, or at least figures set within a real environment in which context their nakedness made some sense. He concluded:

In La Hollandaise the mottled appearance of the skin is a study of the effects of colour and light on the body, and certain areas such as the left breast are elegantly and delicately painted. It is certain, however, that Sickert was aware of the complex multiplicity of the image, and despite intending the painting to be an aesthetic treatment of the body, he was by no means innocent of its provocative and disturbing possibilities.

Sickert went on to exploit these possibilities even further in his most notorious set of works, the Camden Town Murder paintings, 1908–9. These pictures, which referred to the recent local murder of a prostitute, caused a sensation when exhibited at the first Camden Town Group exhibition in June 1911. Once again, the ubiquitous iron bedstead featured as the central focal point around which Sickert organised a figural tableau. Unlike his earlier series, however, the artist now paired an unclothed female with a fully dressed male which greatly altered the context of the nude in an interior. In paintings such as The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do About the Rent? c.1908 (fig.3)13 and L’Affaire de Camden Town 1909 (fig.4),14 the inclusion of a clothed male protagonist introduces an implied narrative of violence and sex. Although not as extreme or overt, these sordid undercurrents are present in La Hollandaise.

The art historian Richard Shone has suggested that the title may have been inspired by one of the minor incidental female characters in the novels of Honoré de Balzac. Sarah Gobseck, a prostitute who appears in several of the stories of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, is familiarly known as ‘la belle Hollandaise’. This ‘magnificent creature’ is purported to be the grand-niece of a Dutch money-lender who leads an immoral and wanton life and is eventually murdered by one of her clients. The title of the painting, therefore, is possibly intended to project connotations of prostitution, or, less specifically, to be representative of a generic grim realism. In Balzac’s Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau (published 1838), the character is described as ‘one of those mad-cap women who care nothing as to where the money comes from, or how it is obtained ... she never thought of the morrow, for her the future was after dinner, and the end of the month eternity, even if she had bills to pay’,15 a statement which may have appealed to Sickert as reminiscent of his own imprudent character.

The title of La Hollandaise translates as ‘The Dutch Girl’ and may reflect a sense of seriality when linked to other works of this period. It is one of a number of paintings by Sickert with similarly continental titles, for example La Jolie Veneitienne 1903–4 (private collection),16 La Belle Sicilienne c.1905 (David Fullen),17 La Belle Rousse c.1905 (private collection),18 Les Petites Belges 1906 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),19 and The Belgian Cocotte 1906 (Arts Council Collection, London).20 Furthermore, as Wendy Baron has noted, the foreshortened figure and crossed placement of limbs recalls Sickert’s earlier group of Venetian nudes, for example, Conversations 1903–4 (private collection).21 Sickert himself was a cosmopolitan character, equally at home in London, Dieppe or Venice. Despite reducing the means of identifying one model from another to a label indicating their nationality, he was not actually interested in analysing cultural difference. Rather his titles reflect the sameness of his approach. His interest lay in finding models from within a certain class of woman and painting them in a variety of poses, both nude and clothed, against an interior that was uniformly dingy and unprepossessing. Essentially, Sickert believed, the experience of urban existence was the same wherever he went.