The Camden Town Group in Context

Charles Ginner was an influential member of the Camden Town Group. Born in France and having lived in Paris for almost a decade before moving to London, he appeared an authority on continental modern art to his British colleagues.1 Malcolm Drummond painted a ‘vital and characteristic’ portrait of his friend in 1911 (figs.1 and 2),2 displayed at the second Camden Town Group exhibition, which presents Ginner as a suave and sophisticated artist, standing nonchalantly with cigarette in hand in front of one of his post-impressionist paintings. Ginner lived in England for the rest of his life but retained a French accent for many years, humorously caricatured in a 1914 letter to the secretary of the London Group, James Bolivar Manson (fig.3).

Isaac Charles Ginner was born in Cannes in the south of France on 4 March 1878.3 He was the third of four children of Isaac Benjamin Ginner (died 1895), from Hastings in Sussex, and Lydia Adeline Wightman, who had lived in London and was of Scottish descent. Ginner’s father established the Pharmacie Ginner in Cannes,4 and his elder brother, Ernest Wightman Ginner, later became a doctor with a practice on the Riviera. Ginner’s eldest brother had died in infancy. His youngest sibling, Ruby Mary Adeline Ginner (later Dyer), became a dancer and dance teacher; many of Ginner’s works were in her collection.5

Ginner was educated in Cannes at the Collège Stanislas. At the age of sixteen he contracted typhoid and double pneumonia and was sent to recuperate on a long sea voyage on his uncle Charles Harrison’s tramp steamer in the Mediterranean and South Atlantic.6 Upon returning to Cannes, he spent time working in an engineer’s office before moving to Paris at the age of twenty-one where he was employed in an architect’s office from 1899 until 1904.7

The former director of the Tate Gallery and friend of Ginner, John Rothenstein, wrote about the artist that: ‘For as long as he could remember he wished to be a painter, but he had to overcome the opposition of his family’.8 With financial help from his uncle, Ginner eventually enrolled at the Académie Vitti in Paris in 1904. During his time at art school he earned money as a magazine illustrator, creating some highly detailed, ironic depictions of lascivious gentlemen in decadent Parisian scenes.9 He studied at the Académie until 1908 firstly under the French artist Paul Jean Gervais (1859–1936) and later the Spanish painter Hermen Anglada-Camarasa (1871–1959), as well as briefly studying in 1905 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.10 He may have learnt to use bright colours and impasto from Anglada-Camarasa;11 a fluid handling of thick paint can be seen in Ginner’s earliest known oil paintings, The Sunlit Wall 1908 (private collection),12 Tache Décorative – Tulipes 1908 (private collection)13 and Girl at an Easel c.1908–9 (private collection).14 This style was short-lived, however, as he soon developed the unique system of methodically applying thick paint in small brushstrokes, which he continued with throughout his life, as his student Marjorie Lilly recollected:

While still resident in Paris, Ginner contributed to his first London exhibition: the open-submission Allied Artists’ Association at the Royal Albert Hall in 1908. The organiser, Frank Rutter, later recalled:

In April of the following year Ginner travelled to Buenos Aires in Argentina.17 The art historian Malcolm Easton states that Ginner held a joint exhibition in September at the Salón Costa in Buenos Aires with a fellow student from the Académie Vitti, the Danish painter Dora Erichsen (died 1943),18 where he sold at least five paintings.19 The art historian Wendy Baron reasons that the two probably travelled to and from Argentina together,20 and that Dora was most likely the married woman described in Benjamin Fairfax Hall’s first-hand account of Ginner:

By the time Dora became known in Fitzroy Street circles, she was the wife of a physician, Dr Alfred Victor Sly.22 Harold Gilman painted her in Mrs A. Victor Sly c.1914–15 (Wakefield Art Gallery).23 In A Little Cheque 1914 (Sotheby’s),24 Walter Sickert depicted Dora and Ginner’s financial arrangement as described by Fairfax Hall. Her first husband died on 1 May 1920 and on 29 December 1921 she married a solicitor, Robert Leo Fulford. Dora was given many works by Ginner over the years,25 and Baron argues that she is the sitter in Ginner’s The Girl Philosopher 1929 (Christie’s).26 Dora may also be the female artist in Ginner’s Girl at an Easel, which was painted in South America and depicts a pale-faced, blonde-haired young woman painting at an easel.27

At the end of 1909 Ginner moved to London, where his mother and sister had relocated following the mother’s remarriage.28 Around 1910 he began recording his paintings and drawings in a series of four notebooks in which is listed the titles, dates and sizes of works, as well as where they were exhibited and to whom they were sold, exchanged or given away (fig.4).29 He backdated his records to 1908, where the first oil painting is listed. The notebooks reveal that Ginner continued to exhibit abroad after settling in London, including at the Salon des Indépendants and Roger Fry’s Exposition de quelques artistes indépendants anglais at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris in July 1912, as well as in Antwerp in Belgium (1911) and Switzerland (1918), as well as many towns and cities across Britain.

In 1910 Ginner was invited to be part of the Hanging Committee for the third exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association. The committee was alphabetically chosen, and so Ginner met Gilman and Gore. The three became firm friends, and Rutter believed this was the reason why Ginner permanently remained in London.30 It might also have been that he met Sickert in France who advised the move to London.31 Ginner first lived with his mother in Prince of Wales Mansions by Battersea Park, with a studio in Tadema Street, Chelsea.32 Around 1911 he moved to 3 Chesterfield Street (now Crestfield Street) by King’s Cross Station, close to Gore and Gilman in Camden Town.33

As Rothenstein noted, ‘Ginner, one of the most consistent painters of the time, possessed a knowledge of Parisian theory and practice approached by very few of his English contemporaries’.34 In the autumn of 1910, Ginner accompanied Gilman to Roger Fry’s seminal exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists.35 With Rutter the two also visited Paris,36 where at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune they saw ‘a room entirely decorated with the works of Van Gogh, a sight unsurpassed in beauty and intensity’.37 Van Gogh was a great inspiration to Ginner throughout his career, influencing his use of bright colours, thick paint and occasionally a more expressive style, as seen in Victoria Embankment Gardens 1912 (Tate T03841). The critic of the Art News wrote of the brightness of Ginner’s works on display in the first Camden Town Group exhibition:

Ginner assimilated van Gogh’s realist creed, and a photograph of him from the late 1940s shows him reading the 1918 edition of the Dutch artist’s letters.39

Although a photograph from c.1911–12 shows him painting en plein air,40 Ginner generally made sketches from nature, making notes in the margins about particular colours, which he then squared up for transfer to canvas. He used a homemade viewfinder, 11 x 9 cm, subdivided with black and white cotton to find his compositions.41 He also made small oil sketches, each recorded as a ‘pochade’ (pocket sketch) in his notebooks.

Around 1911 Ginner began painting the central London scenes for which he is most famous. These include The Café Royal 1911 (Tate N05050), Leicester Square 1912 (fig.5), Victoria Embankment Gardens 1912 (Tate T03841), Piccadilly Circus 1912 (Tate T03096), The Circus 1913 (fig.6), London Bridge 1913 (Museum of London),42 The Sunlit Square, Victoria 1913 (Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport),43 The Angel, Islington 1913 (private collection)44 and The Fruit Stall 1914 (fig.7). He continued to depict similar scenes throughout his career, as in The Church of All Souls, Langham Place, London 1924 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)45 and The Albert Memorial 1935 (Southampton City Art Gallery).46

In 1912 Ginner worked with Gore on murals for Madame Strindberg’s nightclub, the Cave of the Golden Calf, on Heddon Street off Regent Street, where he produced abstracted compositions of animals,47 as well as a futurist-inspired poster for the club depicting Piccadilly Circus.48 The following year, he exhibited at Rutter’s Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the Doré Galleries. These were rare forays into abstraction for Ginner, however, who kept his distinctive realist style throughout his life.

As well as painting central London, Ginner also created a ‘historic series’ of ‘the industrial cities of Yorkshire’.49 He visited Leeds with Gilman for the first time in 1913. Rutter had moved there to work at Leeds Art Gallery and had organised an exhibition of post-impressionist painting with the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, Michael Sadler, who later owned several of Ginner’s works. Ginner painted many industrial scenes of Leeds, such as Leeds Canal 1914 (Leeds City Art Gallery)50 and The Barges, Leeds 1916 (Southampton City Art Gallery),51 and during the war depicted soldiers in a Leeds hospital in Roberts 8 1916 (fig.8), painted before he became an official war artist.52 According to his notebooks he also gave lectures, including a talk on ‘Modern Art and the Future’ on 27 September 1915 at the Leeds Art Club.53

Ginner was not just a painter of urban scenes. In the late summer of 1912 he stayed at Harold Bertram Harrison’s farm, Applehayes, with Gore and Robert Bevan. He visited again in 1913 and 1914.54 There he painted works including West Country Landscape 1912 (private collection),55 North Devon 1912 (private collection),56 Landscape with Farmhouses c.1912–13 (Manchester City Art Galleries)57 and Clayhidon 1913 (fig.9). Two works from the 1912 trip, North Devon and Rain on the Hill (private collections),58 were exhibited along with his famous London scene, Piccadilly Circus (Tate T03096), at the third Camden Town Group exhibition in December that year. Following his sister’s move to Boscastle in Cornwall around 1915 he visited her and the area often, painting works such as Hartland Point from Boscastle 1941 (Tate N05306).

On 1 January 1914, Ginner published a manifesto on ‘Neo-Realism’ in the New Age. The article was republished in April in the catalogue of his and Gilman’s exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, representing their combined philosophy.59 The pair had also exhibited under this title in the Allied Artists’ Association exhibition in July the previous year. Ginner began:

He felt, however, that some of his contemporaries were producing work that simply imitated the innovations of the great realists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and van Gogh:

For Ginner ‘Neo-Realism’ challenged this formulaic art:

He also described his views on painterly technique:

Ginner’s article received a detailed response in the New Age from the critic and philosopher T.E. Hulme who rejected the view that realism was the only viable art form, favouring abstraction instead:

Sickert responded ironically to Ginner’s article:

Lucien Pissarro was likewise reticent about the term, writing to James Bolivar Manson in November 1913, ‘I fail to understand why some of them have taken the title of Neo-Realist – I fear they don’t quite know where they are going and as true opportunists want to be ready to turn with the wind.’66

In a later review of the New English Art Club, Sickert complimented the smooth and tonal work of Henry Lamb, criticising the use of impasto and bright colours:

Ginner and Gilman saw this as a veiled attack on their manner of painting. Ginner deftly responded, ‘Sir, – Paint is thicker than turpentine. In answer to Mr. Sickert I have but one statement to make: I shall paint as thick as I damn well please.’68 Despite these differences, Ginner’s statement on realism can be seen as a manifesto for many members of the Camden Town Group:

In early summer 1914 Ginner became a member of Bevan’s Cumberland Market Group alongside Gilman and John Nash, which held ‘At Homes’ in Bevan’s studio overlooking the old market square (figs.10 and 11). In January 1916 he set up a painting school with Gilman at 15–16 Little Pulteney Street, Soho, where he taught Marjorie Lilly, who recalled:

The school closed in December the following year as Ginner had left for war.71 Rothenstein wrote of Ginner’s time at war:

Working as a war artist he spent eight weeks in Hereford, close to the border with Wales, where he recorded work in a munitions powder-filling factory in a large painting, No.14 Filling Station, Hereford 1918 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), which has numerous sketches (for example, fig.12). Ginner served as an official war artist in both world wars.

Following the war Ginner continued his close partnership with Gilman, sharing his studio at 47 Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road.73 With Rutter, the two had set up the illustrated quarterly Art and Letters in 1917. But in 1919, Ginner became ill with influenza, which Gilman contracted through nursing him; the flu then developed into pneumonia for both of them and Gilman died.74 Their friend, the painter Hubert Wellington, wrote of the pair in the catalogue for an exhibition of Ginner’s works in 1925:

In 1920 Ginner had his first solo exhibition at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, with a catalogue introduction by Walter Bayes. He became a member of the New English Art Club,76 but still remained part of the avant-garde, showing in Wyndham Lewis’s Group X exhibition at the Mansard Gallery, March–April 1920. The following year he helped to organise an Exposition d’un groupe de peintres modernes at the Galerie Druet, Paris from June to July, where his work was shown alongside that of Gilman, Bevan, Nash, Stanislawa de Karlowska, E.M. O’Rourke Dickey, McKnight Kauffer, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and Ethelbert White.

Following Gilman’s death, Ginner moved to 61 Hampstead High Street where he lived until 1938.77 There he painted numerous scenes of the local area, many depicting the view from his windows, as well as the woods on Hampstead Heath.78 During this period he became friends with Edward Le Bas, who was to be a great patron and he painted the artist in 1930 (fig.13). As in a self-portrait from the 1940s in which he sternly surveys the viewer with pipe in mouth,79 Ginner increasingly used pencil, ink and watercolour to create his compositions rather than oil paint, perhaps owing to financial difficulties.

In 1938 he moved to 66 Claverton Street in Pimlico, close to the Tate Gallery; Snow in Pimlico 1939 (Tate N05270) is an example of the works he continued to paint from his window there. In 1942 at the age of sixty-four he was elected an Associate Royal Academician, about which he wrote to his friend and fellow artist, Stanislawa de Karlowska, ‘Last April I was elected an A.R.A.! Just imagine it, me in the Royal Academy – wonders will never cease!’80 Three years later he was also made a full member of the Royal Watercolour Society, and joked to Karlowska, ‘I am, as you see, still going up in the world.’81 In 1950 he was made a CBE for his contribution to the arts.82 Wellington’s view of Ginner in 1925 encapsulates his career:

Ginner died of pneumonia on 6 January 1952 at the age of seventy-three. The Arts Council held a touring exhibition of forty-three of his works the following year.84