The Camden Town Group in Context

Commissioned from the artist by Sir Alec Martin 1935, by whom presented through the National Art Collections Fund to Tate Gallery 1958.

Walter Sickert chose the same supports for the portraits of Sir Alec Martin and Lady Martin (Tate T00222), suggesting that they were prepared at the same time. The canvas is a coarse open-weave cloth, probably jute, supplied pre-primed and stretched by the artists’ colourmen Newman. The cloth is sized and primed with a lean white ground, providing a slightly absorbent preparatory surface with a rough texture.

Sickert has used the same basic painting technique for both portraits. He initially drew with a brush in black paint directly onto the lean white ground to establish the outlines of his composition, perhaps working from life. This was followed by a first painting to lay-in a camaieu-type preparation using selected colours each in a range of two tones, consisting of pure pigment and the same pigment mixed with white on his palette. He applied a black grid on top of this first painting, perhaps using a ‘grille’ (see Tate N04673) and working with a squared-up image, in this case probably a photograph. This enabled him to work freely building up the tonal composition and using the squared-up image as a fixed point of reference that he could refer back to but which did not limit him. He explained in a letter to his friend Ethel Sands:

The paint appears lean and is probably all oil-based, squeezed from the tube onto his palette where it was mixed and worked. There is no modification to the composition, perhaps because Sickert was facilitated by the photographic image but also because the portrait was carefully planned so that it could be quickly achieved. The lights are applied using white or near-white paint and not simply exposed ground, as they are in the portrait of Lady Martin, and it is likely that this painting went through the same stages but was then worked on for longer with separate regime for the lights, like that of the portrait of his son (see Tate T00223). All three works are unvarnished reflecting Sickert’s preference for unvarnished surfaces at this time.

In 1935 Sir Alec Martin (1884–1971) commissioned Walter Sickert to paint portraits of himself, his wife Ada, Lady Martin, and their youngest son, Claude. Martin later admitted: ‘We treated the whole thing as a bit of fun. I wasn’t really expecting a great deal from him.’1 However, the seventy-five-year-old Sickert astounded him by producing three significant portraits, which justified and confirmed his reputation as one of Britain’s greatest living artists (see also Tate T00222 and T00223, figs.1 and 2).

Sickert’s portrait of the fifty-one-year-old Martin depicts him wearing a light grey suit with a waistcoat and jacket sitting cross-legged in a blue armchair with his head slightly turned to his right in order to face the viewer. The interior shown in the background is one of the rooms at Hauteville, Sickert’s house at St Peter’s-in-Thanet, near Broadstairs in Kent.2 Martin is seated in front of a large fireplace and beside his chair on a side table on the right there is a structure made of wood and metal, possibly a reading stand, and the base and bulb of an electric lamp without a shade. The assortment of items arranged along the mantelpiece, such as the gilt-framed mirror, the paintings and prints, and the domed glass bell-jar, are typical of the type of domestic interior Sickert had become famous for painting. The framed painting partially visible on the wall on the right-hand side appears to be the same long landscape-format picture fully apparent in the portrait of Lady Martin (Tate T00222).

Martin joined Christie’s auction house as an office boy in 1897, a month before his thirteenth birthday, and rose through the company until he became the managing director, a post which he held from 1940–58. His knowledge and passion for art informed his own activities as a collector and he was described as having catholic tastes and a discerning eye based on quality rather than investment potential.3 During his lifetime he also served as a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, a trustee of the Wallace Collection and as honorary secretary of the National Art Collections Fund. He was knighted in 1934 and during his lifetime had his portrait painted by John Laviers Wheatley (fig.3), as well as by Sickert. His obituary in the Times described him as ‘Smallish, roundish, indefatigable, bright of eye ... long remembered as adviser to many and as good and faithful friend to more – one who retained to the last a sense of adventure’.4

Martin certainly acted as a ‘good and faithful friend’ to Sickert. The two men were introduced by the collector, Hugh Lane (1875–1915), in around 1899 when Martin was only fifteen years old and Sickert was approaching forty and just divorced from his first wife.5 In his recorded reminiscences for the BBC in 1961, Martin described his lifelong friendship with Sickert as ‘one of the landmarks of one’s life to have known him and be in his inner circle of friendship’.6 They shared many interests in addition to art, including the music hall and swimming in the Serpentine.7 Martin respected Sickert as one of Britain’s greatest living artists, but also recognised his vulnerability in old age and frequently took practical steps to alleviate Sickert’s money worries. He remained a trusted friend and adviser for many years, attending Sickert’s eightieth birthday tea party in 1940.8 He is recorded as present at Sickert’s funeral in St-Martin-in-the-Fields in 1940 and continued to look after the artist’s posthumous interests as sole executor of his will.

Sickert’s lack of financial acumen characterised his dealings as a professional artist throughout his life. He was apt, for example, to waste money unnecessarily and to charge too little for his works. His improvident behaviour particularly worried and frustrated his friends who attempted to instil in him the need for economy and saving, for his wife’s sake as much as his own. In 1934 Sickert’s debts had become awkward enough for him to approach Martin at Christie’s with a view to selling some engravings for ready cash. Martin recognised Sickert’s situation was far more serious and was moved to do something for him. With Sylvia Gosse, Gerald Kelly and John Cooper he formed a committee, and in May petitioned a number of supporters and admirers asking them to contribute to a fund. The list of benefactors to the fund numbered over two hundred names and included celebrities from the art world such as Clive Bell, Philip Wilson Steer and William Rothenstein, old friends such as Walter Taylor, Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, former students such as Winston Churchill and Lord Methuen, and admirers and patrons like Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Peggy Ashcroft. Not everyone they approached was sympathetic, however. Henry Tonks wrote to the critic D.S. MacColl:

Charles Aitken seems to have been in the minority, however. Martin’s efforts raised £2,050, a sum which erased Sickert’s debts and left funds to spare. A trust was established to meter out the remaining money in regular instalments, a measure designed to prevent it being frittered away. Sickert wrote to Martin to thank him for:

Martin continued to try to find ways of supporting Sickert during the 1930s. He persuaded the artist to spend the summer in Margate, close to the Martins’ house at Broadstairs, a move which suited Sickert so well that he decided to stay on and rented a house in the nearby village of St-Peter’s-in-Thanet. The house was called ‘Hopeville’, although Sickert soon changed this to ‘Hauteville’. The commission for portraits of the Martin family was clearly also intended as another way of providing Sickert with some additional income.

Dennis Farr in the catalogue entry for the 1964 Tate Gallery catalogue noted the existence of a squared-up photograph of Sickert standing against part of the same background of the two portraits.11 Sickert’s preferred method for painting portraits had been to rely solely on photographic sources. As he explained after completing his portrait of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies in 1932 (Tate N04673), he had no desire to paint directly from the subject since the demanding nature of the experience for the sitter was not conducive to great portraiture.12 Besides, he told Ffrangcon-Davies, ‘I know your face so well I don’t have to have you before me to paint you’.13

However, it appears that in later years Sickert may have combined the use of photographs with an occasional return to direct observation of his model. His last portrait, Mrs Anna Knight (Tate N06142), for example, seems to have been painted directly in front of the subject. In a letter to the Tate Gallery in 1958, Alec Martin recorded that he clearly remembered sitting to the artist in one of the rooms of Hauteville but, unlike his wife and son, he did not recall a photograph having been taken of him.14 The composition of the painting seems to confirm a photographic source since it favours the cropping of the body in favour of the upward view of the fireplace. It seems likely therefore that, in common with the rest of his family, a reference snapshot was taken of Martin by Thérèse Lessore without his being aware of it, but it also seems that Sickert used his time with the sitter to make useful sketches which also informed the painting process. A small pencil sketch of the head of Sir Alec Martin was sold at Christie’s in 1987.15

In the later decades of the twentieth century, art historians begun to re-evaluate Sickert’s late work. David Sylvester and Richard Morphet both wrote key polemical essays reconsidering Sickert’s late photograph-based work with reference to developments in British figurative painting and pop art. Morphet, for example, compared the size, appearance and composition of Sickert’s portrait of Sir Alec Martin to Francis Bacon’s series of paintings of seated figures.16 Like Sickert, Bacon (1909–1992) complicated interior spaces with mirrored reflections, pictures within pictures and oppressive furnishings. Morphet describes the figure of Martin as being visually enclosed both by the furniture and the visible gridlines of Sickert’s squaring-up: ‘Taken with the box-like enclosed space created by the mirror, these make a not too distant, even if unintentional, parallel with the curtains and boxes by which Bacon’s seated figures are often enclosed. The raw directness of paint application is a further obvious parallel.’17

David Sylvester, who had a long association with Bacon, also drew parallels between the two artists, comparing their liking for ‘strange shapes, queer misshapen shapes’.18 Writing about Sickert’s portraits of Sir Alec and Lady Martin, he argued that:

Even during his own lifetime, commentators identified an absence of empathy on Sickert’s part with the subjects he chose to paint. Despite identifying scenes with an emotive or dramatic potential, Sickert remains at all times a dispassionate observer. All three Martin portraits display this characteristic detachment. Very little of the personality of the sitters is revealed from the way they have been portrayed. Alec Martin was a highly successful and intelligent man and someone whom Sickert counted as a friend and supporter. Given his recent indebtedness to Martin, the artist might, for example, have chosen to depict him as a discerning connoisseur or a kindly philanthropist, yet almost nothing of the sitter’s personal or professional traits are apparent within his portrait. The fall of light on Martin’s face veils his eyes behind their glasses in shadow and renders his face strangely blank and unreadable. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that the existential quality of Sickert’s work was appreciated and interpreted.