The Camden Town Group in Context

Walter Sickert; Redfern Gallery, London, purchased by Contemporary Art Society 1941 and presented to Tate Gallery.

The Straw Hat is a graphite and copy pencil drawing on wove paper. The paper is machine made, medium weight and off-white in tone. The top and bottom edges of the sheet are cut straight and the right and left are uneven, suggesting they have been torn. The drawing was created using a soft graphite pencil and covers the majority of the paper sheet. In the shadow areas of the sitter’s hat and hair, details have been emphasised with a copy pencil,1 which produces a black matt line.

Although the artist remains unidentified, this drawing of a young girl wearing a type of flat straw hat popularly associated with London street-sellers or costerwomen is an archetypal Camden Town Group subject. Formerly credited to Harold Gilman, but uncharacteristic of his style, the drawing has also been connected in the past with its previous owner, Walter Richard Sickert. The appearance of the model with her boater style hat, elaborately coiled hair and fur-collared coat, as well as her left-facing profile, is highly reminiscent of Sickert’s painting Mother and Daughter: Lou Lou I Love You 1911 (private collection),1 the related etching, Mother and Daughter, published in 1915,2 and its pen and ink study, reproduced in the New Age in July 1911 (fig.1).

In 1941 the Director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein, asked his uncle and former Fitzroy Street Group member, Albert Rutherston (1881–1953), to give his opinion as to its authorship. In a letter to his nephew, Rutherston wrote:

Despite Rutherston’s certainty, and despite the obvious similarity to other compositions, the careful tonal style of The Straw Hat is quite unlike Sickert’s style of draughtsmanship and since 1964 the work has been ascribed to a follower.4 This attribution has also been endorsed by the art historian Wendy Baron who believes the artist was

She has identified the fireplace in the background of the drawing as the same as that which appears in a number of Sickert’s works dating from his Camden Town period, including The New Home 1908 (fig.2) and Ennui c.1914 (Tate N03846). As Baron has confirmed, this identifies the setting of the drawing as the ‘Wellington House Academy’ studio on the corner of Granby Street and 247 Hampstead Road, which Sickert rented between at least 1908 and 1914.6 Although he never officially ran an art school from there, it seems likely that he shared both the space, and his models, with some of his many students during this period. The catalogue of an exhibition held at the Carfax Gallery in 1913 by ‘Past and Present Pupils of Mr Sickert’, for example, contains a couple of drawings and etchings by Regina Middleton entitled Dickens’ First School.7 This may be a reference to the ‘Wellington House Academy’, so called because it had once housed a school by that name attended by Charles Dickens.8

There are at least two possible suggestions regarding the identity of the female model in The Straw Hat. As Rutherston proposed in the letter quoted above, the model may be the same figure as the fair-haired girl marking sheets in his painting, The Laundry Girls 1906 (Tate N04996, fig.3). In an article for the Burlington Magazine in 1943 Rutherston wrote:

A drawing by Rutherston of Emily in profile was reproduced in the same article and comparison with The Straw Hat reveals similar features, including a small upturned nose.10

Alternatively, Baron has speculated that the model is the same person featured in a 1908 drawing by Sickert, exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in 1911 as The American Sailor Hat.11 This study, related to the oil painting L’Américaine 1908 (Tate N05090), depicts a girl facing right with her left hand under her chin. Aside from the ubiquitous hat and the profile of her face, a close resemblance can be seen to the twisted hairstyle fastened by a large comb. An annotated copy of the catalogue in the Tate Archive includes an inscription by the entry for this drawing which reads ‘Sally Waters green char[coal]’ (fig.4).12 Baron has argued that this is because the author of the comments (possibly fellow Camden Town member, John Doman Turner) recognised the model as a familiar face.13 However, it is also possible that the writer merely identified a link between the drawing and yet another image by Sickert of a woman in a hat, the lithograph entitled Little Sally Waters 1907,14 published in a quarterly magazine, the Neolith, in May 1908.

Regardless of whether the girl in The Straw Hat is Emily or Sally Waters, the actual identity of the sitter is of secondary importance to her perceived social classification. Like many of the women who feature in Camden Town images she is representative of a particular urban stereotype. Her flat straw hat, combined with the fact that she is wearing an outdoor coat in an interior setting, lead the viewer to the inevitable assumption that this woman is a working class urban type, the Camden Town coster-girl.15