The Camden Town Group in Context

... ; Sir Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) by 1933, by whom bequeathed to Tate Gallery 1941.

Two Women on a Sofa – Le Tose was painted using similar materials and techniques to those Sickert employed for A Marengo (Tate N04621). The support is probably of Italian origin: it has the same distinctive stretcher with dove-tailed cross-section, open mortice and tenon joints to restrict movement of the corners and the cloth is the same medium-weight fine plain weave cotton with opaque lead and chalk off-white priming.

Sickert applied an opaque grey layer onto the commercial priming. He then painted in oil using the grey primer as a mid-tone, depicting strong shadows using black paint with contrasting lights applied more thickly in yellow, pink and flesh colours. This is an economic method allowing him to execute the work quickly and spontaneously with very little reworking or rubbing down. The paint was of medium viscosity when applied and retains some of the brushwork. It has become more transparent with age causing a darkening of tone in the thinner areas over a grey priming and increased contrast with the thicker paint. There is a thin coating of varnish, which does not appear to be contemporary with the painting, although it is not known whether this replaced an earlier original varnish.

Walter Sickert painted this work during his visit to Venice in 1903–4; the title ‘Le Tose’ is Venetian slang for ‘the girls’. As in A Marengo (Tate N03621, fig.1), the sitters are the prostitutes Carolina dell’Acqua and La Giuseppina. They sit on the Empire style sofa that Sickert had in his painting room on the top floor of 940 Calle dei Frati. The constrained, planar composition forces attention onto the figures, although their faces are blurred and impossible to read, creating a sense of ambiguity. We can only look to the pose and set of their bodies to read meaning – they are evidently looking back at the painter, the figure on the left looking bored as she rests her head on her hand, the two women obviously on familiar terms as they sit together closely. The figure on the right is relaxed, her feet tucked up under her.

As the art historian David Peters Corbett has noted, there are affinities with Edgar Degas’s pictures of resting prostitutes, such as Waiting c.1876–7 (Musée Picasso, Paris).1 However, whereas in pictures by Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec there is no question of the women’s occupation or the setting as a brothel, Sickert’s are less explicit,2 inviting the viewer to speculate on the significance of the scene. While this level of innocent reading is possible with Le Tose, it is more difficult to sustain in other pictures in the series, especially those such as Conversations 1903–4 (private collection)3 or Giuseppina and the Model 1903–4 (private collection),4 which combine a clothed figure with a naked one on a bed. Le Tose is the only picture in the series which shows the two women sitting together on a sofa.

In an account to his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche, Sickert stated that in this series of works he painted the figures directly, getting the models to hold their pose for an hour (see Tate N03621). However, he evidently also relied on drawings, as there is an upright pen and ink sketch of Le Tose’s left-hand figure inscribed ‘Sickert – Venezia’, which belonged to the Mayor Gallery in 1958.5 The art historian Wendy Baron also notes of Le Tose that ‘A spurious copy of this painting, known as The Two Sisters, has been in circulation’.6

By the time Sickert arrived in Venice, pictures of ‘la Serenissima’ were a popular and profitable component of the annual Royal Academy exhibition and the Paris Salon. Paintings of the city had, of course, been bought intermittently by British collectors since the time of Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, but a renewed enthusiasm peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. At this time large numbers of artists from many countries went to work in Venice to portray its picturesque canals and, most commonly, sentimental genre scenes of the inhabitants. The leading continental exponents of this type of picture were two Austrian painters, Cecil van Haanen (1844–1914) and Eugene von Blaas (1843–1932), whose style and choice of subject exerted a strong influence on the work of British painters such as Henry Woods (1846–1921). By 1886 the Art Journal was able to identify a ‘modern Venetian school’ whose foremost members were Woods, Luke Fildes (1844–1927) and William Logsdail (1859–1944), noting that:

This popularity in London of anecdotal genre scenes from Venetian life adds an interesting background to Sickert’s decision to paint series of figures in interiors on his 1903–4 visit. Another context in which to see them, and which the genre scenes also engage with, is the interest in physical type, and specifically the different attributes of Venetian women. Various books appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century which adopted an ethnographic approach to the women of Venice. As the art historian Alastair Grieve has noted, there was interest in the possibility that the physical type which had once fascinated Titian was still to be found in the city.8 Published in London in 1894, the German critic Henry Perl’s book Venezia records and comments extensively on different female types, even down to their way of walking. Perl, who was in fact a woman writing under a male alias, drew comparison between ‘the rosy-fleshed Venus-like form rendered so familiar to us in the paintings of Giorgione and Titian’ with ‘the slender yet muscular brunette, who has hitherto been too much neglected’.9

A further context in which to view Sickert’s figure pictures is the widely held contemporary conviction that Venice was a place of moral degradation. As Grieve has noted, one of the leitmotifs of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–3) was his belief that the fall of Venice’s power as a city state was an inevitable effect of the moral decay of its populace.10 In this scheme, the physical crumbling of Venice’s architectural heritage mirrored or expressed the moral collapse of the people.

The first recorded owner of Le Tose was Hugh Walpole (1884–1941), the writer of popular historical novels. He collected nineteenth- and twentieth-century art widely, and owned a number of Sickerts. In 1928 he wrote a preface for the catalogue of Sickert’s exhibition at the Savile Gallery, and its director R.E.A. Wilson commissioned Sickert to paint his portrait (1928, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).11 Giving an indication of the catholic nature of his collecting taste, among the works he bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in 1941 were Max Beerbohm’s Rossetti series (A01038–A01060), Philip Wilson Steer’s Nutting (N05290) and Girl in a Blue Dress (N05295), William Blake’s The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life (N05300), James Tissot’s Portsmouth Dockyard (N05302), Auguste Renoir’s Head of a Girl (N05293), and Montagne Sainte Victoire by Paul Cézanne (N05303).