The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased by Sylvia Gosse from the Carfax Gallery, London, c.1912 and presented to Tate Gallery 1917.

Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe is painted on prepared stretched canvas. The stretcher is stamped ‘Modele De Pose/ B’ and although it is not known who supplied this type of pre-stretched canvas, the stamp suggests that it was a patented commercial support, probably supplied by a Dieppe colourman. Canvases could be bought pre-primed and stretched in a range of standard sizes, which were fixed for all French suppliers; each size was available in three formats: figure, paysage and marines; and a range of different weights: ordinaire, fine and coutil, for example.

For this painting Sickert chose an F20 canvas (figure, 0.70 x 0.60 m), loosely woven and of medium weight (ordinaire), but turned and used it in landscape format. He purchased the support pre-primed with a white ground, but again adapted it by applying a thin grey/brown layer onto the primer to act as an optical ground. He applied rich paint in a relatively fluid application to produce the buildings and the figures, which is clearly evident in the figures’ stylisation. In comparison to Sickert’s other works there is little real impasto, and the paint is brushed more smoothly from a less well-loaded brush.

The later visible paint appears to have been applied wet-in-wet, producing a spontaneous feel to the work. But from the grey/brown underlayer and the white priming through to the canvas tops there is evidence of underlying layers having been rubbed down. Sickert may have derived this practice from James Abbott McNeill Whistler who rubbed down his paintings after each sitting, starting again on the next sitting until the final coat was applied alla prima.1

The colours are generally opaque and would have appeared slightly higher in tone but have dulled as overlying paint layers have become more transparent and the effect of the grey/brown underlayer has become more pronounced in the areas of thinner and darker paint. The painting has been varnished with a soft resin, which was probably applied by the artist.

First exhibited under the title Dieppe at the April exhibition of the New English Art Club in 1891, Walter Sickert’s picture attracted only modest critical attention, although all of it was positive. Generally the show received few reviews, and most of those focused on Philip Wilson Steer’s Mrs Cyprian Williams (Tate N04422). The Sunday Times noted of the exhibition that:

The Echo concurred, writing that Sickert was

The Café des Tribunaux was one of the best-known landmarks of Dieppe, and continues its trade today. It stands at the focal point of the town on the Puits Salé, where two streets that run up from the harbour side, the Rue St Jacques and the Grande Rue, converge. Sickert shows the view down the Grande Rue, the main shopping street of Dieppe. Since 1945 the café has been refaced and the Grande Rue widened, so that the shops on the right of the picture no longer exist.

Dieppe was a popular town with British visitors and holidaymakers in this period, and the Café des Tribunaux was a common destination. As a familiar sight it might be assumed that the subject would appeal to picture buyers. The prominent British presence in Dieppe is attested to by the barber’s sign on the right of Sickert’s picture which is partly in English. Sickert himself had a long-standing connection with the town. He first went there on holiday with his parents in August 1879 and after his engagement in 1885 visited regularly. Later he had a studio there and spent much of his time between 1895 and 1905 in the town. Dieppe became a focus for a long series of paintings by Sickert from this time (including Tate N05045, N05094, N05096), but it also formed the subject of some of his earliest works, small oil on panel studies from 1885 of the beach and local sites.3

Sickert’s treatment of Café des Tribunaux brings together two quite different elements of his work in the later 1880s. Following James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s example, Sickert made a number of small pictures of shop fronts, shown full on, such as The Red Shop (The October Sun) c.1888 (fig.1). While the shops in the Dieppe painting are treated differently, there seems some connection with this existing interest. The other attribute that draws on a success with wholly different subjects is the extremely articulate and technically complex reflection of the café in the window of the barber-shop. Mirrors and reflections appear to have held some fascination for Sickert and formed a feature of some of his music-hall paintings in the late 1880s. In The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror 1888–9 (fig.2), for instance, the performer is depicted reflected in a side mirror, creating a dynamic composition of audience and singer. This was a picture much admired for its ingenuity by the Star, which praised ‘the FEELING OF REFLECTED LIGHT with which all the picture is filled’.4

Sickert was an habitué of the Puits Salé, and each day would sit outside the Café de Rouen, across the way from the Café des Tribunaux.5 It is perhaps from this position that the view in the painting is seen. Sickert’s brother Oswald recalled in a letter of 1895 that it was at the Café de Rouen that, ‘Walter always used to meet me at 12.30 and draw pictures on the little round tables’.6 In 1885 he had made an etching of the Café des Tribunaux.7 This shows the café across the Puits Salé but from the opposite side of the road to the Tate painting, and showing the receding view down the Rue St Jacques. But the concept of mixing an empty foreground, a long receding street and the flat front of the café occupying the middle ground is essentially the same.

Sickert made a second oil of the café which shows a similar standpoint as the etching (?exhibited 1891, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).8 This is painted in an upright format, unlike the Tate picture’s landscape canvas, and contains greater human incident in the street. A pen and ink wash drawing has near identical resemblance to the Tate picture (private collection),9 and was almost certainly made to be published as an illustration. However, the areas of shadow in the painting have translated into heavy areas of black in this monochrome design. In 1893 Sickert published a pen and ink illustration of the Ottawa painting in the Cambridge Observer, perhaps as a replacement design.10

At Sickert’s Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in Paris in 1904, a Café des Tribunaux (45) was lent by Adolphe Tavernier. An oil painting Café des Tribunaux was lent by Carfax & Co. to the Contemporary Art Society exhibition in Manchester in December 1911 (65), and again to Leeds in February 1912 (7). Either or both of these may have been the Tate painting or the Ottawa canvas. Edward Marsh recalled the Tate picture coming up at Christie’s, when it was bought by Carfax. No other Dieppe picture in the Tate collection fits the provenance, so it appears he was writing of Café des Tribunaux: