The Camden Town Group in Context

In 1903 James Bolivar Manson resigned from his position as a bank clerk and travelled to Paris with his new wife, the musician Lilian Laugher. There they rented a room for £1 a month in the Latin Quarter and Manson trained at the Académie Julian. He became friends with other émigré artists, sharing a studio with the Russian painters Charles Polowetski (born 1884) and Bernard Gussow (1881–1957) and the American sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880–1959).

Gussow and Epstein had first rented a studio on the rue Belloni (now rue d’Arsonval), Montparnasse in 1902. According to David Buckman’s account, Manson shared this studio in 1903 with Epstein, Gussow and Polowetski, each artist using one corner of the room. In this picture Polowetski stands behind Gussow and uses a remote shutter release to take the photograph; Manson, in the centre of the image, is comically draped with a white rag. On the right of the photograph is another Russian artist, Samuel Halpert (1884–1930), who painted a portrait of Manson around the time this photograph was taken (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London). Epstein is not in the photograph but may be represented by what appears to be a sculptor’s visor hanging on the wall behind. For more on Epstein and Manson, see TGA 806/1/300, TGA 806/1/301, TGA 806/1/302, TGA 806/1/303 and TGA 806/1/304.

David Buckman, James Bolivar Manson: An English Impressionist, 1879–1945, London 1973.