The Camden Town Group in Context

Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, c.1909; R.E.A. Wilson; John Lawrence Rayner of the Eldar Gallery, London, from whom purchased by the Leicester Galleries, London, c.1929; J.B. Elliot; sold anonymously, Christie’s, London, 9 February 1934 (3, as ‘Portrait of Mrs Barrett’), bought Helen Lessore; Beaux-Arts Gallery; Redfern Gallery; acquired by the Contemporary Art Society 1939 and presented to Tate Gallery 1940.

Mrs Barrett is executed in pastel on a grey-green coloured paper laid down on a 5 mm board. Sickert may have worked on the paper and had it lined onto the board later or purchased the support as a composite from an artists’ colourman. He may have initially sketched in the composition onto the paper in a graphic media, such as pencil, before sketching in the portrait in black pastel.

Sickert worked from dark to light using the colour of the paper as a neutral mid-tone. Darker colours and tones were applied first, blocking in with broad strokes that were broken by the rough texture of the paper and working across the full extent of the sheet. Lighter colours and tones were built up over the top so as to retain the purity of colour.

Sickert has used short or hatched strokes to work in more detailed areas of the image on top of the initial blocking in. Finally, he has used sharper black pastel lines to delineate details and define boundaries of space and form. There is a visible border along the edges of the image where the pastel is thinner, suggesting that the artist reworked the portrait after it had been framed. The pastel appears to be unfixed, retaining the grained texture of the pastel applied onto the textured paper.

The identity of the woman in this pastel has been a subject of complex speculation. In Sickert’s oil titled Mrs Barrett 1906 (private collection),1 what could be the same model – albeit looking perhaps somewhat younger – appears dressed like a coster-girl, with a large, wide-brimmed hat. On a postcard to his friend Elizabeth Swinton, Sickert inscribed a drawing of its composition, ‘Thursday afternoon. New model.’ 1906 (private collection).2 Unfortunately, he does not mention the sitter’s name. In her 1960 Sickert catalogue, Lillian Browse wrote that Mrs Barrett was Sickert’s one-time charlady, but after the catalogue’s publication Mrs Barrett’s daughter-in-law contacted her with a photograph, informing her that Mrs Barrett had been a dressmaker.3 The oil once belonged to Robert Emmons, as did another pastel of the same sitter, which in his lifetime was titled Blackmail. Mrs Barrett 1905 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).4 Seated in a chair, hand on chin, this is quite evidently the same sitter as in the Tate pastel, her hair parted and coiffed in exactly the same way. When Blackmail. Mrs Barrett was unframed, an old Bernheim label and another handwritten one gave the title as Popolana Veneziana, which can be translated as ‘Woman of the Venetian People’. This would seem to contradict the identification of the sitter as Mrs Barrett, unless she was Venetian.

Emmons knew Sickert only from 1927, when he enrolled in his art school at Highbury Place, Islington,5 long after any association Sickert would have had with Mrs Barrett. But as his biographer, in touch with many of Sickert’s circle as well as the artist himself, it is probable that he would have had some corroboration of the sitter’s name in the two works in his collection. In a letter to the Tate Gallery in 1958, Emmons confirmed that, ‘I always thought the sitter for Blackmail was Mrs Barrett’.6 As to Mrs Barrett’s profession, Emmons commented:

An added complication is a letter from Mrs G.E. Brookes, widow of John Lawrence Rayner of the Eldar Gallery, in the Tate Catalogue file.8 She writes that the Tate pastel is almost certainly the same as that once known as The Russian Girl. According to her records this measured 21 x 27½ inches, was in pencil, chalk and wash, and was among the stock of Sickert’s work taken from the art dealer R.E.A. Wilson when her husband started the Eldar Gallery in around 1919. Most of these had been bought by Wilson directly from the artist. All this has led the art historian Wendy Baron to question whether, logically, the pastel might therefore show Elizabeth Swinton, who was born in St Petersburg, although was not actually Russian.9 But Swinton’s different bone structure and age make this identification unlikely, and if the pastel sitter is the same as in the oil Mrs Barrett, then Sickert’s postcard to Swinton about depicting a ‘new model’ would make this identification impossible.

The character of the sitter in the oil painting Mrs Barrett and the Tate pastel does seem markedly different. In the oil she has the look of a working class woman – a ‘woman of the people’ as the Bernheim label suggests. But in the pastel her fur stole or collar and pearl necklace seem to imply a figure of more affluent social standing. It is possible that Sickert was playing with just such emblematic connotations of class, identity and representation. Using his sitter like an actor on a stage, the identity that we think we perceive is based only on superficial pointers to her character and personality.

The pastel was made in Sickert’s rooms at 8 Fitzroy Street in London,10 and in the mirror is reflected the recognisable iron bedstead that he had there. Sitting on the dressing table in front of the mirror, and also reflected in it, is a sculpture cast. This is the ecorché flayed man that, when Sickert made the pastel, was attributed to Michelangelo. It recurs in Sickert’s self-portrait The Painter in his Studio 1907 (fig.1).11 This picture depicts the artist reflected in a mirror, flanked by three sculpture casts: a variant of the Knidian Venus; the flayed man; and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (Musée du Louvre). While these casts were often found in artists’ studios around this time, the art historian Anna Gruetzner Robins suggests that Sickert may have been deliberately alluding to the classical inspiration shared by many modern French artists.12 Pierre Bonnard displayed a postcard of the same Venus in his studio and sourced antique Venuses for a group of female nude paintings, while the Dying Slave was a source of stimulation for Auguste Rodin. Like Sickert, Paul Cézanne owned a cast of the flayed man, and it appears in a number of his works, such as in the background of Still Life with Plaster Cupid 1895 (Courtauld Gallery, London),13 or in the numerous carefully drawn studies such as Ecorché and Interior with a Chair 1887–90 (Öffentlich Kunstsammlung Basel, Kupferstichkabinett).14 ‘Until his last day,’ Joachim Gasquet wrote, Cézanne ‘drew or painted Michelangelo’s écorché an hour every morning, from every angle, like a priest reading his breviary.’15 Evidently it was an important object for Cézanne, but whether Sickert was aware of this is unknown.

Sickert seems to have enjoyed the pairing of real figures with sculpted or cast ones. In addition to The Painter in his Studio, it was a device he returned to in Self-Portrait: The Bust of Tom Sayers 1913 (fig.2),16 where he depicts himself reflected in an overmantel, in front of which stands a bust of the boxer Tom Sayers (1826–1865) on the mantelpiece. Sickert’s etching Cicely Hay, 1923 (The Large Plate)17 follows the precedent of Tate’s Mrs Barrett by having a china group of two embracing figures appear prominently next to the sitter’s head on a shelf or table behind. The embracing figures perhaps might represent the warm feelings Sickert held for Hay, but it seems unlikely the flayed man has the same purpose in Mrs Barrett. Not only is it less prominent, an object that is simply in the room, but it is difficult to grasp what such a pairing might mean. Nor does Sickert appear to have held strong feelings about Michelangelo, who is not mentioned once in all his writings on art.18

The subject and style of the pastel also positions itself alongside contemporary French art. The long streaks of colour with which it is drawn appear deliberately to recall the pastels of Edgar Degas, and also the intimacy of pictures by Bonnard.

The mirror in the background indicates that this might be the pastel exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune in 1907 and 1909 as Le Mirroir carré (The Square Mirror). Bernheim’s stated dimensions of 53 x 69 cm are close enough to make this a possibility.19