The Camden Town Group in Context

Mrs Mary Johanna Gore, the artist’s widow; bought at the French Gallery, London, in autumn 1928 for £190 by J.W. Freshfield who bequeathed it to Tate Gallery 1955.

North London Girl is painted in artists’ oil paints on prepared stretched canvas. A paper label inscribed in Harold Gilman’s hand is attached to the back of the stretcher, and reads: ‘painted by SPF Gore in 1909, signed (74)’; beneath the ink is an earlier date in pencil of 1908/09 (see also Tate T02260). The canvas is plain, coarse-weave linen. It is prepared with a distinct layer of glue size and dense pure lead-white priming, probably in an oil medium. The mark of the artists’ colourman Percy Young is stamped on the back of the cloth. The canvas is stretched over a four-member stretcher and attached with steel tacks which remain in their original positions. The dimensions of the painting conform to a standard commercial size, historically called ‘head size’, suggesting that the support was probably purchased pre-stretched from the colourman.

There is no visible sign of underdrawing or squaring up. The composition was initially drawn in blue paint, which can be seen where the paint film is thinner, for example the sitter’s head and left shoulder (see also Tate T02260). The subject is reduced to areas of decorative colour and pattern of equal emphasis, while Gore has subtly retained the character of each form by varying the brushwork. The curtain, furnishings and sitter’s clothing are boldly handled with loose strokes of rich paint worked wet-in-wet to create a lively surface with low impasto. The wallpaper is blended wet-in-wet using a more fluid paint and imparting a sense of flatness. The lower left of the composition is summarily described with rapid sketchy brushwork leaving priming exposed. The sitter’s hat and face are closely worked: greens, blues, pinks and yellows are applied with short directional strokes juxtaposing complementary colours finding hue in light and shadow to evoke the luminosity of her complexion. Gore synthesised the treatment of colour and line that he observed in the work of French impressionist painting earlier than Gilman. By 1908–9 he had already begun to question traditional ways of using colour, moving away from the reliance on earth colours to measure tonality, as he wrote to his student John Doman Turner:

The studio stamp at the lower right-hand corner in a mauve coloured oil paint is composed of a mixture of lead white, alizarin crimson, synthetic ultramarine, possibly some bone black and kaolin extender to make the colour. The stamp is consistent with others found on Gore’s work and was probably applied by Gilman at the same time that he wrote and attached the label to the back. The painting appears to have been varnished using a cloth after the studio stamp was applied.

The name of the sitter is not known, but in a letter to the Tate Gallery of October 1960, Gore’s widow Mollie recalled that ‘she was such a nice woman, married, with several children. She kept the rooms clean at 19 Fitzroy Street dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, looking v. handsome in a black velvet dress.’1 The writer John Woodeson stated that:

Gore’s Woman Standing in a Window c.1908 (Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, Canada) appears to be another portrait of the same person. The sitter in his Nude 1910 (fig.1), which once belonged to Gilman, seems to have an even closer similarity to the sitter in North London Girl.

It had been Sickert’s idea in spring 1907 to rent first-floor rooms at 19 Fitzroy Street where works by a loose association of artists with whom he felt in sympathy might be displayed and sold. The founder members were Sickert, Gore, Gilman, Walter Russell, William Rothenstein and Albert Rutherston, who were joined shortly afterwards by Lucien Pissarro, Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, and in 1908 by Robert Bevan. It was from this nucleus that later the Camden Town Group would partly be drawn. The Fitzroy Street painters held regular gatherings on Saturday afternoons, where works on show would be discussed and potential patrons invited to purchase. It was partly an attempt to break free from a reliance on dealers, who were not always sympathetic to their work, and therefore gain a degree of independence. Sickert explained in a letter to Hudson that in setting up the Fitzroy Street salon it was his intention to:

But Sickert also explained that he set up this exhibiting circle ‘for 2 reasons’:

The art collector Sir Louis Fergusson gave a vivid recollection in 1930 of the ‘At Homes’ at 19 Fitzroy Street:

Patrons who attended the Fitzroy Street afternoons included Sir Hugh Lane, Cyril Butler, Hugh Hammersley, Judge William Evans, Walter Taylor, Mrs Charles Hunter, Mrs Donaldson Hudson and Mrs Salaman, well-off individuals who were established collectors. Discussing the types of people he wished to attract, in 1907 Sickert had written to Hudson:

Through his career, Gore made a number of works depicting female sitters in interiors. He would undoubtedly have been aware of pictures similar to North London Girl that Sickert had made, showing women in a domestic setting wearing hats, such as Mrs Barrett 1906 (private collection),8 L’Américaine 1908 (Tate N05090), The New Home 1908 (fig.2) and Two Women c.1911 (fig.3). Sickert’s models were all working-class women; Mrs Barrett was said to be Sickert’s charwoman,9 and the sitters for the other two pictures were ‘two divine coster girls’, whom Sickert relished for ‘the sumptuous poverty of their dress’.10 Gore’s selection of a woman of a similar class might have imitated Sickert’s preference for working women as models, although Gore was also painting interiors which featured his wife by the time he made the Tate painting. He had approached a related subject as early as 1907 with The Flowered Hat or Someone Who Waits (fig.4). This contre-jour head and shoulders study of a woman in front of a window is made in a thoroughly Sickertian idiom, albeit more brightly coloured and, as Sickert favoured, adopting an ambiguous title to add tension, as well as showing a figure walking along the street outside that a label on the stretcher identifies as the older artist himself.11

In North London Girl, Gore treats the sitter with sensitivity and seeks to evoke something of her character. Gore believed strongly in the role of the artist as observer, and felt it wrong to impose too much personality on a portrait. He wrote to his pupil John Doman Turner:

Evidently, he was as interested in paying equal attention to the rich textures, patterns and colours of his sitter’s clothes and surroundings as to their face. This was a practice that Gilman, in particular, became interested in slightly later, and he often liked to juxtapose his figures in a domestic interior by showing them against a background or beside a strip of brightly coloured, patterned wallpaper, as in his portraits of Sylvia Gosse 1913 (Southampton City Art Gallery),13 Stanislawa de Karlowska c.1913 (fig.5) and Ruth Doggett c.1915 (private collection).14 Sickert had used a prominent background of patterned wallpaper in The New Home in 1908, but ultimately it was a device all three artists derived from continental painting, notably from Edouard Vuillard.

When Sickert showed The New Home at the New English Art Club in the summer of 1908, the critic for the Pall Mall Gazette commented that, ‘Here is a woman ill at ease, apparently her hat not yet removed’.15 It was socially acceptable for Edwardian women to keep their hats on indoors, and might have been normal at more formal social gatherings. But at home it would have been unusual. Consequently, the fact that the models are wearing hats lends a certain tension to the scene, as if they have just come inside, or are about to leave. The sitter in North London Girl also seems to be wearing her outdoor coat, which accentuates the feeling of discomfort and lack of relaxation, in opposition to the domestic setting in which she is seated. The lack of an object on which her gaze might be focused suggests that she is staring into space, lost in thought, looking inwards rather than outwards. Similarly, it allows the spectator to scrutinise her without the gaze being met or challenged, a great contrast to the direct, confident stare of Mollie Gore in The Artist’s Wife 1913 (Tate T03561), and one which perhaps reflects the artist’s conscious or unconscious attitude towards the sitter’s status as a servant.

The first owner of the painting was J.W. Freshfield who purchased a number of Camden Town pictures between the two world wars. In addition to North London Girl he also bequeathed to the Tate Gallery Gore’s The Fig Tree 1912 (Tate T00028), and to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Gore’s Morning: The Green Dress c.1908–9,16 122 prints by Sickert, and Sickert’s Lady in Red: Mrs Swinton c.1906.17

Although Harold Gilman dated the work 1908–9 on a label on the back of the canvas after Gore’s death in 1914, the style of the work makes it more likely c.1911–12.