The Camden Town Group in Context

... ; ?sold Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 21 June 1909 (4, as ‘The American Sailor Hat’); purchased by Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1863–1931), London, from the Goupil Gallery, London, 1925; inherited by his wife, Lady Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, by whom bequeathed to Tate Gallery 1940.

For L’Américaine Walter Sickert bought a pre-primed canvas from Percy Young, which was similar to that purchased from the same artists’ colourmen for La Hollandaise (Tate T03548). He clearly chose the canvas for its strong texture: the cloth is made of a mixture of thick hemp fibres and thinner flax [linen] fibres producing a coarse heavy canvas with a pronounced plain open weave. The canvas is attached to a four-member stretcher with widely spaced, zinc-coated tacks. It has been sized with glue and fully primed with a thin layer of lead white and chalk over a thicker more transparent layer of chalk, zinc white and lead white.1

The artist applied a thin wash of grey-brown paint over the commercial priming as an ‘imprimatura’ or toning layer. He then drew his composition in paint onto this layer apparently without any other preliminary underdrawing. He worked over the entire painting on more than one occasion, modifying and reworking areas. It is likely that he allowed time for the paint to dry between applications but it is not clear how many campaigns took place. The paint was brushed in a reasonably viscous state so that it bounced across the surface and was partly rejected by the dry underlayer, reinforcing the texture of the canvas. His touch was probably quite light on the face and in detailed areas he used less paint, employing fine diagonal hatching and touches in the face. Dabs of impasto appear throughout and in some darker and less important areas there is a heavier accumulation of paint where he has loaded his brush and pushed the paint across the surface. There is some wet-in-wet mixing on the painting but this is confined to local areas and is probably largely incidental. The entire surface has been covered with paint leaving no white priming visible and little imprimatura. Some small patches of white paint have been applied as highlights, evidence that he has used a mid/dark ground technique.

The palette is quite strong for Sickert: as well as the usual blacks, browns, greys and dull greens he has used strong reds, oranges, yellows and blues; for example, a small patch of pure blue, possibly cobalt, can be seen in the earlier form of the blue blouse. This departure from his usual palette may reflect Spencer Gore’s influence since, in comparison with the younger Camden Town Group artists, Sickert remained reluctant to employ pure colour unmixed with black or contrasting colours, and there is much reworking of the colours in this painting.

The work is signed at the bottom right-hand corner in red paint, but there are traces of what appear to be an overpainted signature in the top right-hand corner in the same paint.

The title of Sickert’s painting, L’Américaine, refers not to the nationality of the sitter but to her distinctive ‘American Sailor’ hat, a flat-crowned straw boater which was commonly worn during the Edwardian period and was a characteristic feature of the costume of the female London street-sellers known as costermongers. It is one of a number of images by the artist dating from 1908–11 which depict one or more models wearing this particular type of hat. In a letter to Mrs Hugh Hammersley, speculatively dated December 1907, Sickert wrote that he was currently working from ‘two coster girls in the hats called “American sailors” between whom my progress is as transparent & embarrassed as Garrick’s between the two muses’.1 The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1909 as The American Sailor Hat, but by the time it was shown at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1925 it had acquired the more misleading label, L’Américaine. This perhaps reflects a tendency by Sickert to bestow French titles suggestive of nationality upon pictures of anonymous women, for example, La Jolie Veneitienne 1903–4 (private collection),2 La Belle Sicilienne c.1905 (David Fullen),3 La Belle Rousse 1905 (private collection),4 Les Petites Belges 1906 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),5 The Belgian Cocotte 1906 (Arts Council Collection, London),6 and La Hollandaise c.1906 (Tate T03548).

A sketch of L’Américaine appears in an undated letter to his friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in which Sickert reported that he was:

In the same letter the artist described the second picture as featuring another costerwoman ‘in the sumptuous poverty of their class, sham velvet &c. They always wearing for every day [not] dirty, old, worn clothes but Sunday clothes. La [...] perpetuellement en dimanche. Le dénouement de parade.’8 This latter work can be identified as The New Home 1908 (fig.1).9 The art historian Wendy Baron has also listed a series of three further oil paintings and several drawings which feature one or more women wearing the ubiquitous straw hat.10 One charcoal sketch, exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in 1911 as The American Sailor Hat, relates directly to the composition of L’Américaine.11 It shows the same model in a similar pose with her left hand under her chin, although in this instance she is turned in profile to the far right. An annotated copy of the Carfax catalogue in the Tate Archive includes an inscription by the entry for this drawing which reads ‘Sally Waters green char[coal]’.12 This could indicate the name of the model, or may simply recall a further image by Sickert, a lithograph entitled Little Sally Waters 1907, published in a quarterly magazine, the Neolith, in May 1908.13 See also the discussion related to a drawing by a follower of Sickert, The Straw Hat (Tate N05309).

Coster-girls were a source of visual fascination for other artists and writers besides Sickert.14 The tradition of depicting street traders had been established as early as the sixteenth century through a genre of art known as ‘Cries’, romanticised images of individual urban characters identified with a particular trade or product.15 Produced by artists for patrons higher up the social scale, popular print series such as Marcellus Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life 1688, Paul Sandby’s Twelve Cries of London 1760, and Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London 1790s, catalogued an array of national working class types, each peddling their various wares. These images portrayed an idealised, sanitised view of the lower classes which ignored the privations and drudgery of the social reality, and female street hawkers, in particular, such as the milkmaid or the flower seller, were often sentimentalised and aestheticised. The pink-cheeked protagonist of William Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl c.1745 (National Gallery, London),16 for example, epitomises an appealingly robust type of femininity.17 The art historian Ysanne Holt has discussed how this tradition was perpetuated in the late nineteenth century by images of working class women which displaced contemporary middle class anxieties about urban degeneracy and decline.18 Paintings such as William Rothenstein’s The Coster Girls 1894 (Sheffield City Art Galleries) and William Nicholson’s series of wood-engravings, London Types 1898, isolated certain physical and emotional qualities popularly associated with the cockney woman, such as comely well-being, saucy insolence and heroic resilience.19 This type found ultimate expression in the Covent Garden flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, the pert heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, published in 1913.

Sickert’s Camden Town images frequently manipulate this artistic tradition of working class ‘types’.20 Although paintings such as The New Home (fig.1) and Two Women c.1911 (fig.2) exploit the melodramatic stereotype of the cockney woman as ill-used, unhappy or disinterested, the portrayal of the young girl in L’Américaine is complicit with the positive cliché of the female street-seller as a symbol of healthy and attractive vitality.21 The downward tilt of the model’s head, the rosy flush of her cheeks, the way the shadow of the hat veils her eyes and the mannered posture of the hand raised to her face all emphasise the flirtatious, earthy appeal of the urban working class woman.22 Sickert later gave this universal female type a name, christening her ‘Tilly Pullen’. In an article in the New Age in 1910 he explained that this breed of woman was of little artistic value as a traditional studio model, posed, for example, in the guise of a classical goddess.23 The trick was to ‘strip Tilly Pullen of her lendings and tell her to put her own things on again. Let her leave the studio and climb the first dirty little staircase in the first shabby little house.’24 Here, Sickert argued, dressed in her own clothes and in surroundings that meant something to her, she became ‘stuff for a picture’, as powerful an icon of beauty as the Parthenon, a Dürer, a Rembrandt, a Degas or a Renoir.25