The Camden Town Group in Context

Sir Augustus Daniel (1866–1951), probably from the artist; bought at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1951 by Sir Peter Pears (1910–1986); Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, 1976 when purchased by Tate Gallery.

Sickert chose a coarse-textured canvas with double-weave threads for this painting. He purchased the standard three-quarter size canvas pre-primed from the artists’ colourmen Charles Roberson. The cloth has off-white priming, which has been evenly applied and retains the strong weave texture of the canvas, providing a preparatory surface with a heavy tooth. Sickert applied his own thin light red opaque oil ‘priming’ layer over the white primer and a further thin layer of dark paint on top of the red. This darker layer appears throughout much perhaps all of the painting and splashes of the paint extend onto the tacking edges. The figure is painted thinly in red oil paint, possibly with the addition of other resinous media. The background is painted similarly in dull reds and greens to achieve a low tone contrast with the red and in order to make it look brighter. It is tempting to think that Sickert followed the advice of his mentor Edgar Degas and achieved the intensity of colour purely through the tonal contrasts: ‘to surround a patch of, say, Venetian red, so that it appears to be a patch of vermilion’.1

In fact, Sickert selected pure vermilion mixed with a little lead white to achieve the desired colour. The dark underlayers also now appear much stronger thus heightening the contrast between light and dark. Much of the painting was executed using ¼ inch hogshair brushes and the brushmarking is preserved in the dried paint film. The face has been rubbed down and reworked, exposing in the form of the canvas weave the off-white commercial priming, the artist’s light red primer and the dark underpaint in concentric rings around the tops of the canvas threads. The painting was probably originally varnished and does not appear to have been cleaned; there is a thin layer of soft resin varnish applied over the surface.

Born in Birmingham in the West Midlands, Minnie Cunningham was a ‘serio-comic’ singer and dancer in the music halls (fig.1). Her career began around 1888, during which year she performed at a number of London music halls, including the Oxford, the Parthenon and Collins’, being described as a ‘youthful singer and dancer’.1 Owing to confusion with an American actress of the same name born in 1855 there has formerly been a belief that she was, when Sickert painted her, a middle-aged performer,2 adding an extra layer of irony and salaciousness to the songs she sang about herself in the character of an innocent schoolgirl. But, in fact, Cunningham was a young woman in her early twenties when Sickert met her in 1892, and was described by the poet Arthur Symons in a letter to a friend as ‘very pretty, very nice, very young’.3

Cunningham was successful, and shared the bill with such stars as Ada Reeve, Marie Lloyd and Katie Lawrence, all of whose acts were also painted by Sickert (see, for example, fig.2).4 She adopted the stage persona and dress of a teenage girl and sang what Marie Lloyd described as ‘romping schoolgirl songs’.5 Like other such serio-comic performers, such songs were laced with sexually provocative double-entendres that circumvented the obscenity laws. Cunningham wrote many of her own songs, with such titles as The Art of Love, It’s Not the Hen that Cackles the Most that Lays the Largest Egg,6 Did You Ever See a Feather in a Tom Cat’s Tail? and Bridget and Mike, An Irish Serenade.7 When Sickert exhibited his picture of Minnie Cunningham for the first time at the New English Art Club in 1892, his title specified that she was singing I’m an Old Hand at Love, Though I’m Young in Years.

Sickert was introduced to Cunningham by the symbolist poet and music-hall critic Arthur Symons (1865–1945). Infatuated with Cunningham, Symons wrote to Ernest Rhys in 1892, ‘I need scarcely say I have fallen in love with a new dancer. This time it is Minnie Cunningham.’8 Reviewing her performances at the Tivoli in the Star, Symons drew particular attention to Cunningham’s ability as a dancer, describing it as ‘an invention of absolute originality ... the visible caprice, an instinctive poetry of movement, a faultless and exceptional rhythm’.9 Symons was moved to compose a poem about Cunningham’s dancing, which he published in the Sketch:

Symons took Sickert to see Cunningham perform at the Tivoli in the spring of 1892, and later he introduced the two:

Evidently Sickert, too, was captivated, and asked Symons to get Cunningham to agree to be painted by him. In a letter to Herbert Horne dated 25 May 1892, Symons wrote of Cunningham:

This evidence confirms with certainty that the date of Tate’s picture is 1892.13 Traditionally, Minnie Cunningham has been dated in Tate catalogues and elsewhere to c.1889.14 It also suggests that the picture is almost certainly a record of Cunningham’s association with the Tivoli on the Strand (figs.3–4), rather than the Old Bedford in Camden Town, which has been a feature of its title in the Tate collection since its acquisition in 1976.

Sickert’s flat, Whistlerian treatment of his subject and use of brilliant red against a sombre background can be related to works he made at the end of the 1880s such as The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror c.1888–9 (fig.5),15 which similarly shows a music hall singer in a scarlet dress in profile, and The Red Shop c.1888 (Norwich Castle Museum).16 Tate’s picture was evidently made at Sickert’s studio at 53 Glebe Place in Chelsea. He set her on a stand so as to imitate the elevation of the stage, a fact recorded in a letter to Cunningham in 1897 asking her to pose again for a new picture: ‘I want to show you my pictures of Venice and some of the Old Bedford and to make you pose for me. Now I have got a proper stage built, six foot square, with steps up to it, so you won’t be stood on a little stand as you were at Chelsea.’17

Sickert’s music-hall pictures of the 1880s concentrate predominantly on the performers, while those in the later 1890s generally focus on the audience or architecture. As the art historian Wendy Baron has noted,18 Minnie Cunningham was the only music hall picture Sickert made between 1890 and 1894, a period when he was concentrating more on making portraits (see Tate N03181).

Evidently Sickert greatly admired Cunningham and she inspired him to write what is perhaps his only poem:

A drawing of Minnie Cunningham was published as a wood engraving in the Idler in March 1895, signed ‘Sickert’ on one side and the name of the wood engraver on the other;20 essentially it is a reproduction of the painting. Sickert also made a second oil portrait, closely related to Tate’s picture. This shows Cunningham in a very similar composition, with an identical palette of colours but more sketchily painted (fig.6).21 In this work Cunningham holds her arms aloft, perhaps in the act of dancing, and wears a sash-waisted dress albeit still scarlet. Slightly smaller than the Tate painting (610 x 457 mm), it was acquired by Sickert’s friend Sidney Starr, the London impressionist painter.

There are three recorded drawings of Minnie Cunningham. A head and shoulders work in pencil depicting her in profile is similar in intention to Tate’s painting, and presumably made around the same time, perhaps in preparation for the work (c.1892, private collection).22 A crayon and pencil drawing on squared paper, which Sickert inscribed ‘It’s not the hen that cackles the most | That lays the largest egg’, the title of one of Cunningham’s most famous songs (fig.7),23 is evidently related to the painting with arms aloft. Lastly, there is a small drawing of Cunningham’s face, again in profile (c.1892, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).24 The consistent profile format of all these drawings demonstrates that from the beginning Sickert envisaged this approach. Sketches of Cunningham were exhibited in Paintings and Drawings by Walter Sickert in May 1912 at the Carfax Gallery (67) and Studies and Etchings by Walter Sickert in March 1913 at the same venue (18d), but it is not known if they relate to any of the surviving material.

Ultimately, Sickert’s devotion to painting music hall subjects in the 1880s and 1890s was inspired by his friend Edgar Degas. In Paris, Degas and Edouard Manet’s pictures of café concerts had been greeted with some interest, and even respected Salon painters such as Jean Béraud took them up as fitting subjects of urban life.25 But in Britain Sickert faced intense critical hostility when he showed Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence 1887–8 (believed destroyed, possibly similar to fig.2)26 at the New English Art Club in April 1888. It represented ‘the lowest degradation of which the art of painting is capable’, according to the Builder, while the Artist believed it symptomatic of ‘the aggressive squalor that pervades to a greater or lesser extent the whole of modern existence.’27 Even other members of the New English Art Club were shocked, and the artist Stanhope Forbes angrily scorned the picture as ‘tawdry, vulgar and the sentiment of the lowest music hall’.28

No painter before Sickert had dared to consider the music hall as a fitting subject for art, and his production of such pictures was considered wilful and provocative. In Britain the music hall held distinct connotations of immorality. Many of the acts, Minnie Cunningham included, dealt in the currency of ribald, vulgar or suggestive humour, and it was just this waywardness that partly made the music hall so popular. But the halls themselves were considered dens of dissolution by the moral majority. Alcohol was served throughout performances, and volatile audiences were encouraged to join in singing the often bawdy song choruses. Additionally, many of the halls were believed to be venues where prostitutes plied their trade. The Empire in Leicester Square was particularly notorious as a place where, away from the auditorium in its promenade area, clients could meet prostitutes.

If Sickert’s painting of Minnie Cunningham was inspired partly by Degas’s café concert pictures, its format and treatment derived from James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Sickert had spent much of the 1880s as Whistler’s studio assistant, and many of the American artist’s hallmark approaches to composition were repeated in Sickert’s work from this period. The shallow, almost non-existent foreground, lack of background recession and profile format of Minnie Cunningham are all attributes taken from paintings made by Whistler in the 1870s such as Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother 1871 (fig.8)29 and Arrangement in Grey and Black No.2, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle 1872–3 (Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery).30 The thin, liquid paint Sickert employs also echoes Whistler’s practice in his Nocturne series, while the scrubbed-down appearance of Cunningham’s face is also a feature sometimes found in Whistler’s portraits.

In a sense, Minnie Cunningham draws together the two artistic influences that had exerted a profound impact on Sickert’s work, as it might be characterised as a Degas subject expressed in a Whistlerian idiom. Combining these twin inspirations might almost be seen as a cipher for Sickert’s first meeting with the French artist when he took Portrait of the Artist’s Mother to Paris for Whistler in 1883, bearing the letter of introduction to Degas that Whistler had written him.

A further level of connection is the similarity of Minnie Cunningham to a number of pictures by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. There seem to be fairly strong resonances with Toulouse-Lautrec’s theatrical lithographs, such as the standing half-profile formats of Anna Held, dans toutes ces dames au theatre (1894), Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, Debout (1895) or Miss May Belfort (Grand Planche) (1895) with the orchestra, and most interestingly with the striking red dress print of May Belfort holding a cat (1895). This last, the art historian Richard Thomson has suggested, could potentially have come from Toulouse-Lautrec seeing Sickert’s Minnie Cunningham at the 1892 New English Art Club exhibition.31 But a red dress may have been a common attire of such performers, and to a culture versed in the nuances of what wearing such gaudy colours might represent, scarlet was a further allusion to wayward sexuality and prostitution.

When Sickert exhibited Minnie Cunningham for the first time at the New English Art Club Winter Exhibition in 1892, press criticism was split almost equally between approval and rejection. But what is most noticeable is that in comparison with the enormous number of reviews of his portrait, George Moore (Tate N03181), exhibited the year before, comparatively few notices bothered to mention Minnie Cunningham. Most of the reviews highlighted, instead, Philip Wilson Steer’s impressionist beach scene, Boulogne Sands 1888–91 (Tate N05439).

Describing Minnie Cunningham as ‘thoroughly enjoyable and artistic’, the Birmingham Gazette judged it ‘the picture of the Exhibition’,32 and Black and White agreed it was ‘quite excellent’.33 Several of the negative reviews drew attention to what they believed was the rigid quality of the figure. ‘How inhuman and caricature-like is the result’, Life complained, ‘a pretty little girl is turned into a wooden doll’,34 while the Northern Whig protested ‘her chin is poked out, and her hand standing stiff and wooden, as if she is rehearsing a part for the clock wound up figures in The Mountebanks’.35

George Moore, surely with his own portrait of the previous year still partly in mind, wrote in the Speaker that Sickert

The Spectator praised the beauty of the picture, and the possibilities of the music hall as a subject:

Most surprisingly in view of Cunningham’s popularity, at least two critics appeared to be sincere in writing about the picture as if it was not a stage scene at all but a portrait of a real child. The Birmingham Gazette described her as ‘a sweet little girl, whose beauty is refined enough to bear the glare of the brilliant crimson in which she is dressed’,38 while the Daily Graphic described

The first owner of Minnie Cunningham was Sir Augustus Moore Daniel (1866–1950). Director of the National Gallery from 1929 to 1933, he was a collector and connoisseur of British art and a particular supporter of Philip Wilson Steer. His collection was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, in June 1951, and included pictures by a broad range of modern British artists, including Mark Gertler, William Orpen, Stanley Spencer and Henry Tonks. He appears to have been a modest buyer of Camden Town painting, and owned Harold Gilman’s Mother and Child (Auckland Art Gallery) and two pictures by Charles Ginner. The music hall must have been a particular enthusiasm, for, as well as Minnie Cunningham, Daniel also owned Sickert’s The Sisters Lloyd c.1888–9 (Government Art Collection).40

At the posthumous exhibition of Daniel’s collection at the Leicester Galleries in 1951, Minnie Cunningham was bought by the tenor Peter Pears (1910–1986). Pears was particularly known for his performances of the compositions of his partner Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), and together they formed a collection of British pictures, including works by John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Mark Gertler, Spencer Gore, Gwen John and John Piper. In addition to Minnie Cunningham, they also owned Sickert’s Santa Maria della Salute,41 and both pictures were included in the exhibition of their collection by the Arts Council in 1955. Pears sold Minnie Cunningham in 1976, following Britten’s death.