Camden Town Group

Camden Town Group. Group of British painters formed in 1911 who took their name from the drab working-class area of London (as it was then) made popular as a subject by Sickert, who lived in the borough for several years. In addition to being the prime inspiration of the group, Sickert suggested the name. The group lasted only two years, but its name is also used in a broader sense to characterize a distinctive strain in British painting from about 1905 to 1920, and as Wendy Baron, the group's leading historian, has written, ‘If we define Camden Town painting as the objective record of aspects of urban life in a basically Impressionist-derived handling, and recognize it as a distinct movement in British art, then we must accept that the heyday of Camden Town painting was over by the time the Camden Town Group was born.’ Many of Sickert's disciples showed their work at the exhibitions of the Allied Artists' Association, founded in 1908, and several of them also did so at the New English Art Club, but for some of them these institutions were not progressive enough, which led to the decision to form the Camden Town Group in 1911. Women were excluded and it was decided to limit the membership to sixteen, who were originally: Walter Bayes, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond (1880–1945), Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore (president), J. D. Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot (1886–1911), J. B. Manson (1879–1945), who was secretary, Lucien Pissarro, William Ratcliffe (1870–1955), Sickert himself, and John Doman Turner (c.1873–1938), an amateur painter who had been a pupil of Gore. Lightfoot soon resigned (and committed suicide a few months later); he was replaced by Duncan Grant.

These artists varied considerably in their aims and styles. Their subjects included not only street scenes in Camden Town, but also landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes. Several of them painted with a technique that can loosely be described as Impressionist, with broad, broken touches, but particularly after Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912, the use of bold, flat areas of colour became characteristic of others, notably Bevan, Gilman, Ginner, and Gore. These four best represent a distinctive Camden Town ‘style’, one that was much imitated by painters of the urban scene up to the Second World War and beyond. The Camden Town Group held three exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery, London, in 1911–12. They were financial failures, and as the gallery then declined to put on more exhibitions, they merged with a number of smaller groups to form the London Group in November 1913. The new body organized a collective exhibition in Brighton at the end of 1913, but although the exhibition was advertised under the name of the Camden Town Group, it may be regarded rather as the first exhibition of the London Group.