The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased from Mrs Sylvia Gilman, the sitter’s widow, by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest and presented to Tate Gallery 1957.

Sickert purchased a pre-primed canvas from the artists’ colourman John B. Smith, who had premises close to Sickert’s studio on Hampstead Road, NW1. He chose a fine tightly woven canvas prepared with sizing and thin off-white priming, providing a finely grained preparatory surface. The artist appears to have brushed a further layer of thinned grey paint onto the ground to form a cold grey ‘imprimatura’ or priming. He may have executed the work truly alla prima, in one sitting (see also Tate N03182): it exhibits some wet-in-wet mixing in the impasto and appears to have been painted quickly, with little preparation, in the manner of an oil sketch painted from life, with brush hairs caught in the paint where he worked most vigorously.

Sickert established the portrait drawing roughly in paint and then coarsely brushed in browns and ochres with a 4 mm hogshair brush to block in the body, background and shadows on the face. By not painting up to the colour boundaries he left significant areas of the imprimatura exposed throughout the composition. He painted the face in an impressionist technique using a loaded brush with little further working or modification of the paint, creating thick raised impasto with dabs of colour in red, pink and green forming peaks up to 2 mm high on the face. Sickert left it unvarnished in the dusty studio for some time, where the paint absorbed dust as it dried. He may never have intended to varnish it, although a thin layer was at some time applied, perhaps by a dealer.

The Camden Town Group made a small but distinguished number of self-portraits and portraits of one another. Malcolm Drummond’s oil of Ginner c.1911 (fig.1) was included in the second Camden Town Group exhibition in December 1911 (41), and Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman both painted portraits of Stanislawa de Karlowska, Robert Bevan’s wife. Drummond also painted the famous group portrait of J.B. Manson, Gore and Charles Ginner considering a painting in 19 Fitzroy Street c.1913–14 (fig.2). Such activities imply a strong sense of self-identity among the group, and to a certain degree a shared desire to monumentalise its principles. In this they recall other artist groups who commemorated themselves, notably the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites. But portraiture, albeit of a naturalistic, informal, uncommissioned kind, was a recurrent activity in Camden Town painting. Gore painted numerous pictures of his wife (see Tate T03561); Gilman painted a number of his female friends, and notably the sequence of pictures of his landlady Mrs Mounter (see Tate N05317); and Sickert’s arrangements of Hubby and Marie might also be thought of as a kind of assumed domestic portraiture (see Tate N03846).

Sickert painted this portrait of Gilman and presented it to him as a gift. Sylvia Gilman, the artist’s second wife, wrote in a letter to the Tate Gallery in 1958:

If the portrait was done in 1912, it would have had to be made in the first half of the year, as Gilman was away in Sweden from August to November 1912. This was a difficult time for Gilman as his marriage had broken down and his wife had taken their children away to America. Sickert has painted the image extremely freely, the background and body sketched in thinly with a harmony of browns, beige and black. Gilman’s face has been rendered with broken touches of pure colour, spots and dashes of beige, brown, pink and black spots. There was tension between Sickert and Gilman over their different tastes in colour and it is characteristic of Sickert’s sense of humour that the portrait is dominated by the ‘impure spots’ of black and brown that would irritate or amuse his subject. Looking far into the distance with open, clear eyes, his face and figure rapt and still, Gilman seems to have the character of a visionary.

Related to the painting is a drawing Sickert titled Mr Gilman Speaks 1912 (fig.3).2 To a certain degree its technique of broken lines and dots imitates Gilman’s own draughtsmanship; it also seems to be the inspiration for the technique Sickert employed in the oil portrait. The drawing is inscribed with the date 1912 and their similarities suggest both works are from around the same time. The portrait appears to be a close-up of Gilman’s head as it appears in the drawing, and the frame of an overmantel on the left in Mr Gilman Speaks is indicated in paint in the same position in the oil. The inscribed title of Sickert’s drawing is sardonic, a joking reference to the sermonising Gilman occasionally went in for. Gilman was known for his principles and progressive political views. He ‘began to think for himself and take little or nothing on trust,’ his friend Frank Rutter wrote, ‘In politics he became a Socialist with a profound dread and distrust of Society ... Van Gogh particularly appealed to him, partly because Gilman himself had in him a good deal of the Dutchman’s fanatical humanitarianism.’3 In Sickert’s drawing a woman listens attentively to Gilman, hands neatly behind her back, in contrast to a male figure who ignores him and reads a newspaper.

Sickert made this portrait of Gilman while the two men were still on friendly terms and the Camden Town Group was still in existence, before it dissolved into the London Group. Unfortunately, the making and gift of the portrait probably marked a high point in Sickert and Gilman’s relationship. The London Group was formed in November 1913, with Gilman as its first president, and became an amalgam of the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and the vorticists and futurists, and members of the Camden Town Group. They first exhibited together in Brighton in November 1913.4 Although Sickert showed in the exhibition, and gave the opening address, he resigned from the London Group in January 1914, in protest at the work of Lewis and Epstein, considering the latter’s pornographic.5 Sickert and Gilman subsequently quarrelled in 1915 when Sickert, having surrendered his teaching job at Westminster School of Art, reclaimed it, forcing Gilman from the position. Sickert considered Gilman a bad influence on the Westminster pupils because of his support of both the London Group and the brilliant colours of post-impressionism. Gilman was always extremely short of funds, so losing the income from this teaching post was a bitter blow; Sickert was subsequently held in disregard by a number of people in their circle.

However, by this time Gilman and Sickert were already out of sympathy with each other. The accepted contemporary belief was that Sickert’s reclamation of his post was a further sally in a row that had broken out in 1914 over Gilman’s bright palette, pure colour and rough facture, none of which were to Sickert’s taste. Wyndham Lewis wrote:

In June 1914 relations between the two declined sharply after Sickert reviewed the New English Art Club exhibition in the New Age. Ignoring Gilman and Ginner totally, Sickert praised Henry Lamb lavishly as a painter who did not lean towards certain artistic practices:

With justification, Gilman felt this was a thinly veiled criticism of his and Ginner’s work. Sickert’s claim that heavy impasto was ‘not even durable’ and that the colours faded struck deeply at Gilman’s ability to sell his work, implying to potential buyers that his paintings would degrade. The next issue of the New Age printed Gilman’s letter of complaint, under the headline ‘The Worst Critic in London’, although this is likely to have been phrased by the journal rather than Gilman. ‘In making a catalogue of all the things that Mr Lamb knows,’ Gilman wrote,

Charles Ginner expressed himself more succinctly, in a letter printed below Gilman’s:

Sickert’s riposte was to imply in a further piece that Gilman and Ginner were pricked by not being mentioned in his NEAC review, and the article was titled, ‘The Thickest Painters in London’, a double-entendre quite clearly intended to heap mockery upon them. ‘They talk a good deal about Cézanne,’ Sickert wrote patronisingly,

Sickert caused considerable ill feeling in this attack on his former Camden Town colleagues, and others of the circle such as Harold Harrison of Applehayes,11 Hugh Blaker12 and Douglas Fox Pitt wrote in to the New Age. ‘I feel sure Mr Sickert will not be hurt,’ Fox Pitt wrote, ‘when I say that posterity will know him as a great painter and not as an art critic ... People of taste will always be thankful to Mr Sickert for having founded the Camden Town group.’13