The Camden Town Group in Context

No drawings were included in the 2008 Tate Britain exhibition, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group. In that respect it almost precisely mirrored the three exhibitions of the original Camden Town Group, which took place in 1911 and 1912.1 However, the Tate exhibition catalogue refers to the existence of preparatory studies for the majority of the paintings in the 2008 exhibition, confirming the importance of drawing in the practice of Walter Sickert and other members of the group. This brief study outlines how Sickert used drawings as essential tools towards the creation of his paintings. It also cites examples of how progressive members of the Camden Town Group both adopted his process and adapted it significantly to form a more consciously modern style.

Indeed, in the retrospective exhibition of Sickert’s work mounted at the National Gallery in 1941, of which, as his biographer Matthew Sturgis notes, Sickert was only ‘dimly aware ... through the haze of illness’,2 the place that drawings played within his artistic practice was recognised by the fact that they comprised a quarter of the items on show (33 of 132). A number of these were described in the exhibition catalogue as being studies for specific paintings, and a brief appendix stated that ‘Sickert has the habit of taking out old drawings and painting from them many years later’.3 During the artist’s lifetime, many of his drawings found their way into both private and public collections, but the real status of drawing within his artistic procedure remained largely unfathomed until after his death in 1942, when large numbers of sheets were found still in his possession. After the death of his widow, Thérèse Lessore, in 1945, the newly established Sickerts’ Trust, confronted by this embarrassment of riches, undertook to ‘augment the works of Sickert in the various collections of the British Isles and the Dominions’ with the result that, in the immediately ensuing years, hundreds of drawings were donated to public collections.4

It then became obvious that Sickert had exhibited only a very limited proportion of his drawings during his lifetime, and that, although the line of demarcation between working and finished drawings was fluid, those exhibited were principally works which would have been construed as having an appeal for collectors. These had well-defined subjects, whether architectural or narrative, and were relatively large. He retained in his possession those drawings which best served him as a basis for paintings and prints, and which were precise records of locations and events fundamental to his art.

This is not to say that Sickert had at all sought to hide the regularity with which he drew, nor the extent to which his paintings were dependent on his drawings. On the contrary, he was ever at pains to explain the nature of his drawing practice. He did this through the various schools which he founded over many years, through correspondence and conversation, through his public lectures and published criticism, and indeed through publishing drawings in journals.5 Despite these efforts, his drawings never received attention equal to that accorded his paintings, and it was not until 1949 when an Arts Council exhibition focused on the drawings which the Sickerts’ Trust had donated to the Walker Art Gallery that the true extent, range and, indeed, the character of Sickert’s drawing was brought to light.6

Many of the Walker drawings are tiny and would have been considered inappropriate for commercial exhibition. Yet Sickert kept many of them for sixty years. It was these that he took out and painted from years later, and it is these which give real insight into his artistic credo. His earliest extant drawings were made in sketchbooks small enough to fit into the palm of the hand, thereby allowing him to draw, unsuspected and unobserved, restaurant diners, theatre audiences, music-hall performers and whatever else took his fancy. Many were later mounted in groups, often focusing on a particular songstress, or documenting one particular evening of entertainment. That a considerable period might elapse before they were trimmed and mounted is attested by the vagueness of the annotations in Sickert’s hand, for example, ‘1881 or thereabouts | 1882 | 83? | 84?’.7 Sickert evolved his drawing technique to counteract the limitations imposed on him by the generally dark and fluctuating light of the music hall. The drawings are small, perhaps for secrecy, and generally in monochrome pencil (graphite), since the use of ink or wash would have been an encumbrance more likely to attract attention. Lacking the precision of colour, Sickert made tiny, but often surprisingly detailed, notes on his drawings, ‘narrow shadow along the bottom ... scarf ... button flashing’,8 ‘red cap | red jersey with | collar | blue jacket | scarf with | perpendicular | red stripes | blue tights | June 4 [corrected from “June 5”]’ (fig.1). And in his zeal to record as much as possible of the atmosphere of the moment, he would often write down the words of songs: ‘It’s not the hen that cackles the most | that lays the largest egg’ (fig.2).9

Sickert evolved his method to record his chosen themes as exactly as he could, given the environmental limitations. In essence, he was attempting to create a document of photographic accuracy in situations where photography was still unfeasible, despite recent improvements in electric lighting. The perpetual movement of the performers and the ever-changing light meant that he had to be quick, and to the end of his life he was composing new metaphors for his swift and summary seizure of the motif. As he explained in a 1934 lecture at the Thanet School of Art:

Most of the drawing techniques, which Sickert evolved specifically for the purpose of ‘drawing in the dark’, remained with him throughout his life. With considerable insistence he taught many others to follow his methods, and these were unusual enough for his pupils, assistants and friends to think them worthy of record. When, for example, he taught an art class in Manchester in the late 1920s, the process he recommended was documented in detail in a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian in 1930. The artist’s principal recommendations were summarised as follows:

The second stage of Sickert’s instruction ‘concerned itself with the actual making of the picture’:

Finally there came the colouring, when the student again referred back to the colour notes of tone value and local colour he or she had made on the original drawing.

‘The Sickert method’, as it was described, aimed at achieving the accurate transfer of the original drawing, preserving its qualities. As Sickert stipulated, ‘the man ... has got to be drawn. ... He has got to be drawn before the fizziness in his momentary mood has become still and flat.’14

Although Sickert was still enthusiastically revealing the details of his procedure as late as 1934, he seems to have evolved the principal features of his technique by the time he advertised his first ‘atelier’ for students in autumn 1890. Certainly, the drawing he made around 1894, and which he deemed worthy of donation to the British Museum in 1914, was informed by years of nightly stints at the Old Bedford Music Hall (fig.3). It is squared with the artist’s signature red grid for transfer to canvas, thereby documenting the processes described above.

As Sickert made plain, the reliance on sight-size drawing from the motif and on the grid transfer technique were traditional methods used in Renaissance times but largely abandoned in the late Victorian art college.15 However, his abandonment of the subject matter of Victorian history painting in favour of ‘paintings of modern life’ endowed accurate transfer (via the grid) with the status of a sine qua non. Consequently, he was not loath to promote his beliefs to artists of some experience, including his colleagues in the Camden Town Group. The Tate Gallery director, John Rothenstein, later recounted that ‘During a visit to Dieppe in 1911, Sickert showed [Charles Ginner] how to work from squared-up drawings. After 1914 [Ginner] relied entirely on drawings of this character, accompanied by elaborate written colour notes, which he sometimes made by the use of a little homemade viewfinder.’16 Despite his adoption of the Sickert method, Ginner’s finished paintings and watercolours are determinedly different, endowed with what Sickert described as ‘burning patience’.17

It was the other two ‘Gs’ of the Camden Town Group, Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, who developed their painting in a more modern direction while still adhering to the general nature of Sickert’s procedure. Gore met Sickert in Dieppe in 1904 and John Rothenstein presumed that it was Sickert who infused him with his interest in the theatre and music hall. Gore, however, diverged from the detail of the Sickertian procedure, for example dispensing with secrecy and drawing openly using colour:

His friend, the journalist Ashley Gibson, found something of a comic element in Gore’s concentration, remembering him ‘in the Alhambra balcony, always in the same seat, taking sights with thumb and pencil at the uplifted legs of the ballerinas’.19 Some of Gore’s drawings are indeed very like Sickert’s, but he was less pedantic about the need to use them in every situation and recommended painting directly from nature in certain instances (figs.4 and 5).20

Gore and Gilman were both almost twenty years younger than Sickert, more positively attuned to the type of post-impressionist work that they had seen in Roger Fry’s exhibitions of 1910–11 and 1912, and more flexible in their response. As Ashley Gibson recalled, ‘Freddy [Gore] was extraordinarily interested in these new aesthetic portents, full of the legends he had been hearing about their originators, and thrilled me with the dreadful story of Van Gogh’s ear’.21 James Bolivar Manson also stated that ‘Gilman and Gore were in league, and interested in every aspect of art’.22 Despite this ideological detachment from Sickert, and the eventual personal dispute between him and Gilman, both Gore and Gilman continued to use the Sickertian grid but with alterations to the detail of the technique and, in Gilman’s case, a developed attitude to its significance.

Gore made a number of preparatory drawings on the site of The Cinder Path on the outskirts of Letchworth, producing a painting which was advanced enough to be included in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912 (fig.6). The most developed drawing for the composition shows Gore using a grid composed not only of squares but also of a diagonal, diamond-shaped mesh (fig.7). This technique was also used in a preparatory study by Gilman at around the same time (fig.8). In both cases the grid has the effect of flattening the appearance of the composition, effectively making the picture plane assume greater importance. As the art critic Rosalind Krauss has put it in one of her studies of grids in the hands of later twentieth-century modernists:

It is obvious from their painted work that Gore and Gilman were developing paintings with more planar, flattened compositions. These were perhaps originally suggested to Gore by the theatrical flats (flat pieces of wood painted to look like buildings or furniture) which form an important part of his stage scenes, as much as by the example of works by Cézanne seen in the post-impressionist exhibitions. But Gore and Gilman’s method of imposing such a pronounced visual overlay on their drawings clearly contributed to their habit of seeing the world in a more planar and geometric way. Their compositions become infused with flat, rectangular façades placed full-face to the picture plane; their description of objects also tends more to the abstract (figs.9 and 10). Gilman, in particular, developed an incipiently geometric aesthetic based on industrial architecture; the background in his Leeds Market, for example, becoming the ultimate development of Sickert’s transfer grid (figs.11 and 12).

Gilman’s most radical development of the Sickertian transfer grid takes the form of his painting An Eating House. It exists in two versions. The larger version (fig.13) is distinguished from the smaller by the grid of small squares which covers its surface, their edges defined by raised areas of paint.24 It has often been suggested that this grid was used to transfer the compositional design either to, or from, the smaller version.25 This is clearly true, since the squares on the large version number eighteen vertically and twenty-four horizontally, and the small version measures eighteen by twenty-four inches. This canvas size was regularly used by Gilman, which suggests that the small version was the first to be painted, and that Gilman transferred the design in the Sickertian manner to make the larger version. However, in the finished painting the transfer grid would have been covered by the paint layer and invisible beneath it. The method of transfer could not have contributed to the meticulous square ridges of raised paint which cover the large version. They add a rigorous geometric component to a composition already defined by the verticals (of the eating-house’s panelled background) and the horizontals (of the booths).

It has been suggested that Gilman’s use of this painted grid may have been inspired by the work of the Italian painter Antonio Mancini (1852–1930), who used a number of different methods to impart a textured, gridded quality to the surface of his paintings.26 Mancini visited London in 1908 and was mentioned, with approval, by Sickert in articles written that year. However, although Gilman surely knew Mancini’s work, he is more likely to have been struck by the faceting which he would have seen in the more experimental works in the exhibition of futurist paintings in London in March 1912, and in subsequent exhibitions over the next two years. Certainly, Gilman is known to have been introduced to the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) in London,27 and he could not have avoided being as much intrigued by subsequent exhibitions of futurist works as he would have been horrified by their theories of violence.

Although developed from the transfer grid adopted by most of the Camden Town Group, Gilman’s overt display of it as an enlivened surface to this painting is unique within the work of the group, and the source of his inspiration seems to have been equally individual. The grid on the surface of An Eating House is not intended to convey impressions of speed, movement and dynamism which futurist faceting evoked. His inspiration, rather, seems to lie in the work of the French authors that his friend and painting companion Hubert Wellington referred to when introducing an exhibition of Gilman’s work in 1943: ‘He liked the writings of Jules Romains, Charles Vildrac and the “Unanimiste” Group in France for their parallel interests.’28 Briefly, unanimism was the literary exploration of the unity of groups as distinct from the dynamics of the individual. The French writer Jules Romains was interested in the new kinds of group life that resulted from the spread of cities. The eating-house, as depicted by Gilman, is one example of that new sociology. It shows one of the new, not-for-profit eating-houses which aimed to provide decent food for the urban poor. They were promoted by temperance societies and directly opposed to the music-hall culture which Sickert celebrated. (Notice, for example, the advertisement for an R. White’s non-alcoholic and health-promoting squash on the panelling in the background.) In Gilman’s painting, individuals are undifferentiated and defined as a group. Indeed they are merged together by the subtly faceted grid which unifies the composition in an overtly modern geometric manner. Gilman developed Sickert’s utilitarian transfer grid and combined it with his bright, positive colour, to express an optimistic view of new groupings in modern society, extending the essential ethos of Camden Town form and subject matter.29