The Camden Town Group in Context

Bought from the artist by Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, Paris, 1910; acquired by Lord Henry Cavendish Bentinck (1863–1931), London, 1927; inherited by his wife, Lady Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, by whom bequeathed to Tate Gallery 1940.

Walter Sickert used a relatively coarsely woven, commercially primed canvas on a fixed strainer. He painted directly in oil over the off-white priming. The white ground is covered in most places and plays little part in the final image. The development of the layer structure is difficult to interpret and no toned ground or drawing is discernible. It is generally thickly painted although there is little localised high impasto. The painting shows signs of being reworked in places. It is possible that Sickert struggled with parts of this composition: some bright blue is visible within the cracks, which may relate to a change in the composition or at least a very different colour scheme underneath. The paint is medium rich and drying cracks have formed where it is heavily built up in successive layers. Overall, the surface shows signs of the wet paint slumping, with the consequence that the brushwork is not crisp. There is a soft resin varnish layer that may be original.

In October 1906 Walter Sickert exhibited ten pictures at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and arrived in the capital from Dieppe in order to attend the opening. He took a room at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank of the Seine directly opposite the Louvre, which he described as ‘my enchanting hotel a few doors off the house where Ingres died’, where apparently the ‘alcove of the beds in some of the rooms are beautifully lit’.1 Much favoured by artists and writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, previous patrons of the hotel included Richard Wagner, Charles Baudelaire and Camille Pissarro, who had painted a number of views from a window on the third floor during 1903.2 Sickert himself had first stayed there in 1883, in the company of Oscar Wilde (who later died there in 1900). The purpose of that visit had been to deliver Whistler’s iconic portrait of his mother to the Salon, but the trip also marked the occasion of Sickert’s first meeting with Edgar Degas, the French painter who was to have such a profound influence on the direction of his art. Possibly stimulated by memories of that significant moment in his career, or simply enthralled by the artistic ferment of Parisian life, during his visit in 1906 Sickert opted to stay in the hotel for some weeks, during which time he used the room as a studio and produced a large number of paintings and drawings. He wrote to his friend, the painter William Rothenstein, that he was ‘doing a whole set of interiors in the hotel, mostly nudes’, as well as some theatrical subjects.3 This burst of creativity led to a successful solo exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in January 1907. Woman Washing her Hair dates from this period. Painted in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, it was exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune under the title, La Toilette, and later acquired by the gallery in 1910.4

The young, slim model for Woman Washing her Hair was a French girl named Blanche whom Sickert later described as ‘most enchanting ... the thinnest of the thin like a little eel, exquisitely shaped, with red hair’.5 He recalled that:

In this picture Blanche is seen in profile, standing within a closet or bathroom space, bent at the waist with her legs straight and her back curved. As suggested by the title of the picture she is ostensibly in the process of washing her hair over a basin, although her head is hidden from the viewer by the line of the wall. There is a china jug on the floor at her feet and a pink towel draped over a stand behind her. Her clothes appear to have been left on a chair on the right-hand side of the picture, while in the left-hand foreground there is a fireplace surmounted by a shelf and a mirror. The eye of the viewer is led towards the centre of the composition by the strong diagonal of the mantelpiece. The patterned floral green wallpaper is echoed by the swirls evident within the design of the carpet. The art historian Wendy Baron has documented two further paintings which appear to feature the same model in the same corner of this interior. Le Cabinet de Toilette (Count Natale Labia, Cape Town)7 depicts Blanche standing full length with her arms raised behind her head, while Seated Nude (private collection),8 shows her seated with her hands on her hips. Baron has also noted a related sketch in chalk and pen, Nude Girl Lying on her Front (private collection),9 which appears to feature the same model, and two paintings, La Maigre Adeline and Jeanne,10 which depict full-length nudes lying across a bed, also in the same room. A further series of paintings and drawings dating from the same period features a plumper, more curvaceous sitter.11

The painting has been frequently discussed by art historians as an example of Sickert’s connection to modern French painting. It follows the tradition introduced by Edouard Manet and the impressionists of painting naked women without the guise of a mythological or academic context, and with its cropped composition and voyeuristic glimpse of a girl at her toilette, it represents one of the most Degas-esque images of his entire oeuvre.12 However, the focus on horizontals and verticals within the pictorial space and the ‘horror vacui’ integration of the figure within the highly patterned interior also recall the intimiste paintings of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard (see, for example, fig.1).13 Sickert would have seen Bonnard’s painting, Le Cabinet de Toilette, on display at the Salon d’Automne in 1906 at the same time as his own works and was perhaps inspired by its subject matter and appearance.14 As the art historian Anna Gruetzner Robins has discussed, the rectangular form of Sickert’s posed model is echoed by the linearity of the composition, a pictorial device he may have derived from Bonnard’s painting.15

As well as following the French genre of Manet’s Olympia 1863 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris),16 and other paintings of realistically portrayed contemporary women, the depiction of the nude is entirely in line with Sickert’s own firmly held views on the presentation of naked figures. He believed that paintings should always show ‘someone, somewhere’,17 and he condemned art school practice which taught students to draw idealised, ‘lifeless’ nudes without reference to the real world.18 Instead, he articulated, the focus should be placed on drawing people set within the context of a real environment where their nakedness made some sense. His approach here parallels his Venetian and London interiors of lower class women posed within shabby domestic spaces. The cropped view of the headless body creates an impersonal anonymity which is negatively prurient. Yet despite the cluttered claustrophobia of the hotel room and the voyeuristic sense of gazing at a woman who is unaware of being observed, the painting lacks the disturbing ambivalence and grimy atmosphere which pervades so many of his Camden Town pictures (see La Hollandaise, Tate T03548).