The Camden Town Group in Context

Bequeathed by the artist to his sister Mrs Ruby Ginner Dyer, and given by her to Miss Effie Stewart Williams 1952; bought from her in 1968 by Benjamin Fairfax Hall for £30, who gave it to the Friends of the Tate Gallery.

This preparatory study for the painting Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day (Tate N05276) is executed in pencil, ink and watercolour on wove paper. The paper is machine-made, medium weight and of good quality. Three of the edges seem to have been unevenly cut and the right-hand edge appears to have been torn, indicating perhaps that the sheet was a page removed from a sketchbook. There are pinholes along all the edges, especially numerous on the left and the top, which were made by drawing pins probably used to secure the paper to a drawing board.

The image is drawn within a rectangle, measuring 305 x 254 mm, positioned at the centre of the sheet. The drawing is executed within this frame, initially in graphite, using a soft sharp pencil to create fine lines and shading and to describe detail, such as the shop sign. Watercolour is applied over the graphite and confined to the figures and flags, which are boldly coloured in pigment-rich paint, which covers the drawing beneath. A black-ink grid has been applied over the extent of the drawing; where these lines traverse areas of more opaque colour, the greasy ink was repelled by the watercolour. The grid measures 12.5 mm² and each line is numbered from 1 to 19 along the horizontal edge and 1 to 23 along the vertical. Ginner was well known for his tendency to square-up almost all of his preparatory drawings with heavily scored ink lines. Earlier in his career, his artist friends had presented him with architects’ paper, already squared, to pin over the next drawing, but he refused to use it and he continued to square-up his drawings.1

This is a squared-up preparatory study for Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day (Tate N05276, fig.1), and different in kind to a finished exhibition drawing by Ginner, such as his view from the attic of the same house entitled From a Hampstead Window 1923 (Tate N03873, fig.2). This study is not recorded in his notebooks, which only include works made for exhibition.1 The squares are on a grid of half an inch, with the drawn area exactly 12 x 10 inches. Ginner added watercolour to the flags, decorations and clothes only, choosing the parts of the view that he would not see again. The vertical lines of the buildings were first drawn with a ruler and then traced freehand in pencil. The painting follows this drawing almost exactly, the only noticeable alteration being that in the painting the running child at the bottom right does not hold a flag in her hand.

The view is from Ginner’s desk on the first floor of his house at 61 Hampstead High Street in north London. It can be seen again including the top of this desk with his windowsill crowded with china, a vase of flowers, a notebook and other objects, in a drawing entitled Flask Walk, Rain (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).2

The alignment of the buildings in this drawing is slightly different in some places. The room from which he was sketching has three windows, and it seems that Ginner drew slightly different views from these windows, one for each side of the street, looking from the left towards the right and vice versa. The depiction of Flask Walk in the drawing is much closer than it is in reality, especially as the fronts of the houses in Hampstead High Street have been cut off at the right and almost cut off at the left. Ginner’s drawing of the numbers of courses of bricks beside the windows is not accurate.