The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased in 1915 at the London Group exhibition by Walter Taylor (1860–1943), from whom bought by Tate Gallery 1922.

Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord is painted in artists’ oil paints on stretched primed canvas. The cloth is plain close-weave linen, and an illegible stamp on the back enclosing the handwritten digits ‘12741’ is probably a canvas batch number. The canvas is probably sized but no distinct layer is detectable. The priming extends to the tacking edges, retaining the weave texture, and is composed of a single layer of lead white with a trace of kaolin. This type of canvas and the basic preparation is consistent with that found on all of Gilman’s paintings in Tate’s collection (see also Tate T00096).

Gilman squared up the prepared canvas with a grid of drawn lines to transfer the design from a preparatory study (Tate T00026). The one-inch square grid was applied with a black graphic medium and runs continuously beneath the painted image. The lines of the grid have been marked off around the edges in a black liquid medium. The design was initially transferred in black pencil or Conté crayon, which was then reinforced with more freely drawn outlines in mauve oil paint. Colour was applied within these drawn shapes with equal certainty of purpose, each stroke of the brush remaining distinct. The paint was thick when applied, with apparently little addition of thinners or painting medium. Aeration created during vigorous mixing of the stiff artists’ oil colours on the palette is clearly visible under magnification as tiny bubbles in the paint. The brush was heavily loaded with paint and peaked impastos formed as it was drawn sharply away from the canvas at right angles. In some areas, particularly at the edges of more complex shapes, small areas of priming and drawing are left exposed, as Gilman strove not to cross his drawn boundaries. Most shapes are filled with several layers of paint as he modified colour values. This can be seen at the edges of the shapes, where the upper layers do not completely cover those underlying. In the area of the sky the paint is heavily re-worked using more fluid paints applied wet-in-wet, in directional strokes, which form horizontal rows of blues and greys with clouds in light tints. Drying cracks have formed where multiple layers of paint have been applied in relatively quick succession, and the paint has contracted at different rates. The painted surface remains unvarnished.

The notations of colour values in the study (Tate T00026) have been faithfully followed in the painting. Gilman retains careful control over the tonal value of the pure colours that he uses through a process of pre-selection, and the juxtaposition of near complementary colours to heighten their vibrancy. The colour mixtures used by Gilman are all opaque and most appear to contain some white, but pure white is never used on its own. Wyndham Lewis recalled that Gilman once said to him: ‘Thank God we are not “dirty” painters! You never use black, do you? Nor raw umber?’1 Indeed, no black is used. Like the impressionists, Gilman had rejected its use in painting. He appears also to have avoided the use of dark earth pigments. These characteristics are associated with developing a pure ‘spectral’ palette and identified with French impressionist technique from the late nineteenth century.

Following the success of a trip to Sweden in 1912 which spurred him into a bout of creativity, the following year Gilman visited Norway and again produced a large number of pictures, both landscapes and urban scenes. He made another picture of Flekkefjord showing a street scene, which is now in a private collection.2

By comparison with most of the other Camden Town Group artists, Gilman travelled abroad quite widely. In 1894 he spent twelve months in Odessa as tutor to the children of an English family. After leaving the Slade, he went to Madrid for around a year in 1901–2, where he studied and copied Velázquez at the Prado, and where he also met and married his first wife, Grace Canedy. In 1905 they made a long visit to the United States to visit Grace’s family in Illinois and, in 1918, a few months before he died, Gilman went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to make studies for Halifax Harbour at Sunset 1918 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa),3 a commission from the Canadian War Records Office. Gilman apparently considered an even more adventurous journey to find inspiration for his work. In an anecdote which is revealing both of his idealism and his initial admiration for the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, Gilman reputedly put forward a proposal to his Camden Town Group colleagues that they should all go and live in the South Seas and have Arthur Clifton of the Carfax Gallery act as their agent in London. Reputedly, Spencer Gore quietly dissuaded Gilman.4

Gilman visited France on a number of occasions, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants from 1908 to 1910, and again in 1912 and 1913. In 1907 he stayed at Walter Sickert’s house at Neuville outside Dieppe and, most importantly, he visited Paris in late 1910 or early 1911 with his friends Charles Ginner and Frank Rutter in order to see impressionist and post-impressionist pictures. Ginner recalled how they looked at

It was a cathartic experience for Gilman. His palette had already begun to brighten in pictures such as The Blue Blouse: Portrait of Elène Zompolides 1910 (Leeds City Art Gallery)6 and The Breakfast Table 1910 (Southampton Art Gallery).7 In part this may have been simply through exposure to the colourist tendencies already finding expression in the paintings of Gore, Ginner and Robert Bevan. But, as the art historian Andrew Causey has emphasised, another factor was the gathering repudiation of James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s belief in tonal painting and smooth surfaces,8 something that very much characterised the low-key harmony of Gilman’s paintings before 1910. Sickert, whom Gilman initially greatly respected, criticised Whistler repeatedly in print, and in 1910 published an outright and systematic rejection of his work in the Art News. This, Sickert wrote, was something he did ‘speaking for myself, and the very solid phalanx of young painters with whom I move ... To shrink from doing it would be misleading to the students I aspire to lead.’9

By the time Gilman painted Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. Ginner recalled, however, that Gilman

Wyndham Lewis remembered of Gilman that

In addition to his admiration for van Gogh on aesthetic and artistic grounds, Rutter speculated that he identified with the Dutch artist on some more personal level, believing that

Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord was clearly influenced by van Gogh, both in its vibrant palette and handling of paint. Most importantly, it appears also to refer to the several paintings van Gogh made of the Langlois Bridge at Arles,13 although Gilman’s composition does not directly copy any of them. Gilman might have known any of these pictures through reproductions, but the inspiration may have come from one in particular. It is likely he saw The Langlois Bridge (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne)14 during his visit to Paris in 1910–11 when it was in the Bernheim Gallery, which Ginner recorded they visited.

It is possible Gilman painted Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord on his return to London, but more likely that he made it while still in Norway. There are small pin holes in each corner, and depressions of paint that suggest the use of dowel separators when transporting pictures that are still wet.15 The figures on the bridge in Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord are absent from the drawing for it (Tate T00026, fig.1). They provide a sense of movement through the composition and also demonstrate scale, and their colour contrasts markedly with their surroundings.

Gilman moved to the new town of Letchworth Garden City sometime around 1908. His neighbour was Stanley Parker, the brother of Barry Parker of Parker and Unwin, the architects who developed the town. Stanley’s wife Signe (née Bergström) was Swedish, and it may have been as a result of their conversations that Gilman was inspired in 1912 to visit Sweden. Signe’s brother had bought an estate at Sundsholm in south-eastern Sweden, and when the Parkers visited him in 1913, along with William Ratcliffe, it is possible Gilman came too before moving on to Norway.16 The bridge at Flekkefjord dates from 1838, and had changed little when Gilman painted it. But in 1936 it was rebuilt and now looks very different.17 The brightly painted houses were not an invention by the artist, but an accurate account of how the town looked at this time.18

The picture’s first owner was the painter Walter Taylor (1860–1943), a founder member of the London Group and collector of a number of Gilman’s pictures including Leeds Market (Tate N04273). He accumulated a notable group of early modern French and British paintings, owning works by Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Raoul Dufy, Matthew Smith, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord was the first picture by Gilman to enter a public collection when it was bought by the Tate Gallery in 1922.