The Camden Town Group in Context

Perhaps the greatest crime of the nineteenth century has been that of a class of “leader,” artistic, literary, dramatic, that has aimed solely to foster minds possessing the normal vision of reality, and under the guise of truthfulness has misled even intelligent persons with unrealisable expectations. The realistic school of painting is one of the worst offenders in this respect. Though professing contempt for the public, it has yet expressed objects – many of them coarse and repulsive, softened by dexterous handling – which it knew the public would accept, as coming within the public’s every-day experience. It has, indeed, sought to murder idealism with sleight of hand tricks.

The realistic artist is still everywhere aiming rather to express than leave out the utility or inartistic unessentials inseparable from things in the actual. The London picture galleries, for instance, are in the possession of the painter with the normal vision of reality. Let anyone with the abnormal vision of reality go to the Goupil, Carfax, Chenil, or Suffolk Street galleries and he will find painter after painter standing still, their work absolutely stagnant. They are all doing the same thing – offering a point of view which the public unhesitatingly accepts, and employing a technique to which the public may or may not object. The strange fact is they are in the same inartistic world as the public, whereas, as artists, they ought to be in a world of their own. Nothing, therefore, but a few examples of the idealisation of the actual remain to satisfy the visitor. The studies by William Shackleton, with their wonderful feeling of mystery and infinity, at Suffolk Street and the Goupil; Robert Bevan’s studies at Suffolk Street and The Carfax; a very simple and big landscape by C. J. Holmes at Suffolk Street; the three figures by Wyndham Lewis – one of the exhibitors of the Camden Town Group at The Carfax who is not tiresome; Spencer F. Gore’s colour studies at The Stafford Galleries; and at the same place a Gauguin – the well-known Tahitian girl prone on a couch, and a Cezanne [sic] – a thickly painted “Still Life.” He might take many of the other pictures as a text for a lecture on the limitations of the real, concluding with Augustus John. The latter’s amazing portrait group, at Suffolk Street, of two men with cast-iron legs and heads painted like miniatures, is a mournful, depressing sight; while his small landscapes at the Chenil Gallery and elsewhere point to but one conclusion. Mr. John ought to stop turning out such things and study colour and painting. He is easily first among draughtsmen, and easily last among painters.