The Camden Town Group in Context

Bought by Sir Edward Marsh from the Carfax Gallery, London, November 1916 (14); bequeathed through the Contemporary Art Society to Tate Gallery 1953.

This is one of a group of paintings and preparatory drawings of the New Bedford music hall. It is painted on a white pre-primed canvas bought from a local artist’ colourman, John B. Smith, from whom Sickert had previously purchased materials (see Tate T00164). The canvas has a plain close weave and appears to be made of a mixture of linen and cotton fibres. The cloth has been prepared with an absorbent ground consisting of a white primer, which is probably bound in a tempera medium (see Tate N05092). The artist has applied a wash of golden ochre onto the priming as an ‘imprimatura’, using either oil diluted with turpentine or tempera diluted with water. Sickert may have experimented with a tempera medium or may have replicated its effect by applying oil onto lean underpaint.

No drawing is evident on the prepared surface, despite the existence of a similar squared-up preliminary drawing. A darker yellow ochre and red ochre have been applied onto the toning layer and both areas of colour show some abrasion from rubbing (see also Tate N03182). This is then gone over with more thickly brushed paint, which retains the brushstrokes, and is unmodulated, having been pre-mixed on the palette. Details of the composition are painted in a more linear style and the diluted paint remains thin and broken with exposed underlayers and in places thin washes to modify the form. The tones are low except for some strong green and chrome yellow details and the paint generally lean, even in areas of impasto.1 The painting has a glossy varnish that detracts from the matt aesthetic of the paint, but it is not known whether the varnish was applied by the artist.

Sickert exhibited his first music hall painting, Le Lion comique (private collection),1 in 1887. Nearly thirty years later, he was still finding inspiration in London’s palaces of entertainment and in particular from his old haunt, the Bedford music hall in Camden Town. Around 1914 he was commissioned by his friend Ethel Sands to paint a series of pictures to adorn the dining room of her new house in Vale Avenue, Chelsea. Sickert declared himself ‘allumé’ (enlightened, illuminated) by the New Bedford and envisaged a set of large decorative panels depicting the interior of the music hall.2 Begun just before the outbreak of the First World War, his work on the paintings was sporadic and he was still faithlessly promising to bring the scheme to completion over four years later. Sands never received her dining room pictures, but a series of drawings, studies, paintings and etchings testify to Sickert’s intentions. It is with this body of work, and a group of earlier images, that Tate’s painting, The New Bedford, should be related.

The painting depicts a narrow, vertical, stalls to ceiling view of a section of the auditorium to the right of the stage crowded with the audience during a performance. The main focus of the work is a large private box, plushly decorated with red velvet hangings and gilt ornamentation, flanked on either side by two huge female caryatids. Three people, one of whom is a woman wearing a large hat, are seated in the box, high above other members of the audience massed in the circle below. A flight of stairs can be seen connecting the two levels. At the right of the painting there is a partial view of the adjacent smaller box and high above it the railings of the gallery at the top. A drawing in pencil inscribed ‘The Conductor – New Bedford’ c.1908 (private collection)3 confirms that the view shows the area immediately adjacent to the right of the stage and the orchestra pit.

In previous accounts of Sickert’s music hall paintings it has been believed that the ‘Old’ Bedford music hall, built in 1861 on the site of a tavern and tea garden off Camden High Street, was burnt to the ground in 1896. It is not known where this myth originated, but recent research has revealed that no mention of a fire is to be found in council records or in local newspaper reports.4 Instead, it appears that the hall was pulled down in July 1898 for the purposes of expansion and redevelopment by the new proprietors, Benjamin Lucas and Ted Johnson.5 The building work was speedily completed within six months and the ‘New Bedford Palace of Varieties’ reopened on 6 February 1899.6

Reconstructed by the famous theatre architect, Bertie Crewe, the new building had an impressive and decorative façade with a high copper dome that dwarfed the surrounding shops and houses on Camden High Street (fig.1). The real transformation, however, was effected inside, as the New Bedford was changed from a dated, poky, suburban music hall into a spacious and modern venue with plush-covered tip-up seats, electric lighting, a sliding roof for ventilation and a motorised stage curtain.7 The auditorium was constructed as an open space without columns, 75 feet high with a capacity of 1,168, and the interior was lavishly ornamented with gilded plaster decorations and marble mosaic floors.8 ‘At last,’ wrote a journalist in the Camden and Kentish Town’s and St Pancras Gazette, ‘Camden Town has a place of entertainment to be proud of, and one that no one need be backward in comparing with any of the halls or theatres in London for comfort, while in elegance and appointments its internal aspect will compare equally favourably with any of its contemporary structures.’9 Despite its small size, Tate’s painting conveys the soaring height of the auditorium and the opulent scale of the decorations. The Bedford continued its existence as a music hall and theatre, and later as a cinema, until 1959.

Comparison with the newspaper account of the opening of the New Bedford in 1899 reveals how accurately Sickert’s painting reflects the appearance of the interior:

The ‘sensational’ large female caryatids flanking the box can clearly be seen in a photograph of the derelict interior of the Bedford prior to the theatre’s demolition in 1969 (fig.2).11 Sickert wrote that their baroque voluptuousness was ‘the only kind of nude permissible in Bond Street’.12 The New Bedford paintings, drawings and prints can therefore be seen as an up-market continuation of Sickert’s sardonic look at the relationship between the sexes in modern life. The two statuesque nudes dominate the picture yet the audience are utterly oblivious to them. The artist (and the viewer), however, enjoys the voyeuristic spectacle both of the caryatids and of the audience, while taking no notice of whatever is going on to the left on the stage.

Sickert had a long-established practice of depicting the Bedford music hall originating in the 1880s and 1890s. Paintings such as Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall 1888–9 (private collection)13 and Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford c.1890 (private collection)14 immortalised the female stars of the stage, while Gallery of the Old Bedford c.1895 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)15 turned the focus onto the audience. The Bedford’s period of closure and redevelopment coincided with Sickert’s move to France in 1898, and it is likely that he did not visit the renovated building until after his return to London in 1905. From 1906 he started another series of music hall paintings, revisiting some of his old haunts in the process, such as the Middlesex music hall in Drury Lane. In December 1907, he wrote to his friend and patron, Mrs Hugh Hammersley: ‘I am returned to my old love the Bedford & I hope to illustrate the new building as I have already done the old one. My first drawing of the gallery there is dated 1886. Twenty years of (intermittent) fidelity is a record!’16

Sickert’s earliest painting recording the interior of the new building appears to be a small canvas in the collection of the Museum of London dating from around 1906–7.17 He went on to produce at least seven further paintings and two etched plates of the New Bedford.18 There are also a large number of preparatory drawings observing the audience and recording the various architectural elements of the theatre,19 which probably date from two separate periods of activity, c.1906–8 and c.1914–15.20 Seven drawings in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery concentrate on the caryatids and the decorative arches of the boxes that appear in Tate’s painting.21 These are all in pencil, chalk or pen and ink, on lined or graph paper. Sickert told Ethel Sands that his essential equipment for sketching in the Bedford included an account book with an ‘un-upsettable’ ink bottle.22

In a Burlington Magazine article in 2004, Wendy Baron redefined the order in which Sickert’s paintings of the New Bedford were painted, correcting previous suggestions.23 A letter of 1907 from Sickert to Mrs Hammersley refers to work in progress on ‘a tall slice – six foot by twenty-eight inches including a sensational caryatid in plaster, lit from below’.24 Baron demonstrates that this must be The New Bedford, the large tempera and oil on canvas (1829 x 711 mm) now in the collection of Leeds City Art Gallery.25 The painting, which is closely related to Tate’s version, had previously been thought to be a finished panel for Sands’s Chelsea dining room dating from c.1914–16, but the earlier revised dating of c.1907–8 makes this impossible. In another letter, dated c.1910, Sickert invites Mrs Hammersley or her husband to view the version of a New Bedford subject they had commissioned from him. The Hammersley’s painting, The New Bedford (private collection),26 is a half-scale reprise of the Leeds painting. It is almost identical in appearance except that it depicts a slightly wider view, and there are small variations in the audience and the group seated in the box. Both paintings in turn relate to two, almost identical, detailed drawings, one published in the New Age in 1911 (whereabouts unknown),27 and a squared-up drawing (private collection).28 The drawings match the paintings in almost all respects of composition and detail, and are exactly half the size of the Hammersley version.

Like the Hammersley painting, Tate’s The New Bedford is half the scale of the Leeds painting, and it was originally thought that both were preparatory paintings for the larger canvas. Baron, however, argues that in this case Sickert worked from a large to a small scale. She groups all three paintings and the two detailed drawings together and argues that they must all have been executed between late 1907 and early 1911. This means that none of them can be related to the scheme for Sands’s dining room. Baron sketches out the known history of the dining room commission gleaned mostly from the correspondence between Sickert, Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson. A rough oil sketch in landscape format showing the upper circle and balcony level of the music hall (Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate)29 reveals Sickert’s plans for the dining room. This view was to be repeated across three consecutive panels painted in tempera that were intended to cover the mantelpiece side of one wall. The middle section of the triptych (private collection)30 is slightly shorter in height to allow for its placement over the mantelpiece. Baron rightly concludes that although the Leeds New Bedford is roughly the same size as these three pictures, it reproduces a view on a different scale and therefore would have disrupted the overall coherence. She therefore also surmises that none of the images reproducing the vertical view of the New Bedford stage-side box were related to the dining room designs.

Baron’s argument is undoubtedly correct for the Leeds and Hammersley paintings, but it may not be the case that Tate’s New Bedford is also of an earlier date and not connected with the Sands dining room. In a letter to Hudson, Sickert wrote, ‘I have covered a big canvas 33 x 15 with oil paint for a finished study of the mantelpiece side of the room. That will incidentally make a saleable picture for Clifton.’31 The letter is undated but was probably written in the first half of 1914. Baron believes this letter refers to the oil sketch, The New Bedford (Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate), which formed the basic design for the three consecutive panels of the dining room. However, the dimensions of this painting are 23 x 32 inches (585 x 810 mm) and it seems unlikely that Sickert would have misjudged the figures to such an extent. Furthermore, traditionally height comes before width when quoting size. It is possible, however, that Sickert is referring to the version now at Tate. Although the dimensions are not absolutely the same, it is closer in size (36 x 14 inches or 914 x 356 mm) and it looks a more finished and therefore ‘saleable’ subject than the Harrogate study. It was indeed sold through Arthur Clifton’s Carfax Gallery in 1916.

Sickert painted the three large panels for Sands’s dining room in around 1915 following the Harrogate sketch. The middle and left-hand panels are both now in private collections; the whereabouts of the final section is unknown.32 Although they form a coherent sequence intended to fit along the upper part of the dining room wall, this is probably not what Sickert originally intended. He wrote in a letter to Hudson:

Sickert went back to the Bedford night after night to produce new designs for the panels. However, the letter to Hudson seems to imply that he had given serious consideration to reusing his earlier batch of New Bedford images, and that at one time he might have been considering using the vertical format of the Leeds and Hammersley paintings, rather than the horizontal panels he finally chose. Tate’s version is possibly a product of this early experimentation. The painting reproduces exactly the same view seen in the Leeds and Hammersley paintings and the squared-up drawings. The only slight difference occurs in the position of the spectators in the stage-side box (the absence of the woman in the flowered hat in the foreground of the left-hand corner has been previously noted, but in actual fact this figure is present although partially obscured).

There is a pendant to Tate’s painting in another vertical painting representing the full height of the theatre, The New Bedford (Natale Labia Collection, Cape Town).34 The Labia Collection painting shows the view to the right of Tate’s work, incorporating the same caryatid with left arm bent which stands to the left of the gallery box. Sickert reproduced the view in two etchings published in 1915, The New Bedford (The Large Plate) and The New Bedford (The Small Plate).35 Confirmation that the Labia Collection painting and these etchings were linked to the dining room scheme is found within Sickert’s regular correspondence with Ethel Sands, where he wrote in various letters, ‘Your room is amusing very much. Incidentally I am getting etchings out of the studies’,36 and ‘Out of your room has grown a plate which I have had printed today’,37 ‘a little bit of your dining room on copper’.38 In conclusion, therefore, it seems feasible that Tate’s painting is related to the Sands dining room scheme, and therefore retains its date of c.1914–15.

In commissioning Sickert to decorate her dining room Sands may have been inspired by the decorative panels of Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940). Between 1892 and 1899 Vuillard completed a number of decorative schemes for private homes.39 Each set of panels was designed specifically with the patron and location in mind and their private nature meant that they were virtually unknown during Vuillard’s lifetime. However, one group of five oil paintings commissioned by Thadée Natanson was exhibited in Paris in 1895–6. Vuillard, whom Sands knew personally, generally chose subjects for decorations that reflected the social class of his patrons. Whether the idea of the theme for Sands’s dining room came from her or from the artist is not known, but the choice is rather a surprising one for Sands. The elaborate architectural features might have looked at odds in a domestic setting. Furthermore, while Sickert adored the common atmosphere and risqué performances of some of London’s smaller music halls, the tastes of Sands and her guests were likely to have been rather more refined. Her willingness to have her dining room transformed into a recreation of the New Bedford suggests that by the First World War, at least, music halls held a different appeal and reputation than when Sickert first started to paint them in the 1880s. While Sickert was living abroad between 1898 and 1905 the New Bedford had not only undergone a physical transformation but also seems to have become a respectable venue for rather more mainstream and popular family entertainment. Sickert told Sands that on Mondays he visited the Bedford ‘en famille’, taking his wife, Christine, and his mother.40

The art historian Anna Gruetzner Robins has discussed how Sickert’s earlier paintings of the Old Bedford, for example Gallery of the Old Bedford c.1895 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool),41 show spectators seated in ‘the gods’, the cheapest seats at the top of the auditorium. The gaudy, gilt interior was deliberately lavish to provide the working class clientele with a taste of extravagance and luxury, albeit rather vulgar and fake.42 The large mirrors were designed to show the poorer customers reflected within an atmosphere of unfamiliar opulence.43 Tate’s painting of The New Bedford adopts a more remote and detached standpoint than his earlier works. The viewer is positioned as though seated among the audience in the front stalls, but the narrow vertical format forces the gaze upwards and focuses on the party seated in the stage-side box, probably the most expensive seats in the house. Rather than portraying the camaraderie of the ‘boys in the gallery’, Sickert represents a more extravagant group of people, socially, financially and physically elevated above the rest of the audience.

Tate’s painting of The New Bedford was purchased from the Carfax Gallery by Edward Marsh (1872–1953), and was considered by him to be one of the masterpieces of Sickert’s earlier period.44 The painting apparently hung in a recess at the side of the dining room chimneypiece.45 Marsh was an important figure in English cultural life in the first half of the twentieth century. By profession he was a civil servant and served as private secretary to a number of key politicians including Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Asquith. However, his formidable talents and catholic interests extended beyond politics, and at the beginning of the twentieth century he was a key supporter to a number of young writers including Rupert Brooke, Edward Blunden, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon. As general editor of the serialised anthologies Georgian Poetry (1912–22), Marsh was instrumental in bringing many of these authors to prominence.

A love of modern (what became known as modernist) literature was matched by his interest in modern art, and during his lifetime he bought a large number of works by British artists. His purchases were funded from an unusual source. Marsh’s maternal great-grandfather was Spencer Perceval (1762–1812), the only British prime minister to have been assassinated. Perceval’s descendants received a National Grant of £50,000 as compensation, and it was money inherited from that fortune which enabled Marsh to ‘add a little jam to the bread-and butter of a civil servant’ and build up one of the most impressive private collections of modern British art.46

Marsh began by collecting old English masters such as Thomas Girtin, William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. In 1911, however, he made a significant break from this pattern with the purchase from the second Camden Town Group exhibition of Duncan Grant’s Parrot Tulips 1911 (fig.3). Marsh wrote about his ‘conversion’ in A Number of People (1939), describing how it took place largely as a result of his friendship with Robert Ross, director of the Carfax Gallery:

Henceforth, modern art was Marsh’s passion, and although he never collected examples of abstract painting his enlightened and independent attitude represented a significant contribution to British art. Besides paintings by Sickert and Grant, Marsh also owned works by Camden Town Group members Walter Bayes, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, J.D. Innes, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis and Augustus John.

Marsh’s acquaintance with Sickert predates his interest in contemporary art and stemmed from his close friendship with the artist’s younger brother, Oswald Sickert, who was in the year below Marsh at Trinity College, Cambridge. Marsh was first introduced to Walter Sickert over lunch at the Café Royal in 1892 and afterwards visited his studio.48 He later provided a lively description of him

Marsh’s patronage of the arts extended beyond his own private interests and he was a long-standing member of the Contemporary Art Society (Chairman 1937–52), which greatly benefited from his association. During his lifetime he presented the Society with one hundred pictures from his own collection and, on his death in 1953, he bequeathed 250 more. Ten works from the bequest were presented to the Tate Gallery for which Marsh had served as a Trustee (1937–44, and Acting Chairman 1940–1). As well as The New Bedford, the bequest included Stanley Spencer’s Self-Portrait 1914 (Tate N06168) and Dancers c.1910–11, by Duncan Grant (Tate N06181).