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. In addition to being the prime inspiration of the group, Sickert suggested the name, saying that the district had been so watered by his tears that something important must come from its soil. The group lasted only two years and held only three exhibitions, but the 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.’
When Sickert settled in England in 1905 after spending most of the previous two decades in France, he said he wanted to ‘create a Salon d'Automne milieu in London', where progressive artists could discuss, exhibit, and sell their work. To this end he kept open house every Saturday afternoon at his studio at 8 Fitzroy Street (this is in Bloomsbury, but he lived at Mornington Crescent, in the borough of Camden, less than a mile away). In 1906 several of his disciples rented premises at 19 Fitzroy Street that were used as a showroom for their work, and the name ‘Fitzroy Street Group’ has been applied to the artists who met there. Many of these artists also 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 16, who were originally Walter
Bayes, Robert
Bevan, Malcolm
Drummond, Harold
Gilman, Charles
Ginner, Spencer
Gore (president), J. D.
Inness, Augustus
John, Henry
Lamb, Wyndham
Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot (1886–1911), J. B.
Manson (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 resigned after the first exhibition and committed suicide a few months later; he was replaced by Duncan
Grant.
These artists varied considerably in their aims and styles, but their paintings are generally small, unpretentious, and based on everyday life. Their subjects included not only street scenes in Camden Town, but also landscapes, informal portraits, still-lifes, and nudes in shabby bed-sitters ( Sickert wrote in 1908: ‘Taste is the death of a painter … His poetry is the interpretation of everyday life'). Several of the Camden Town artists 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 two exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery, London, in 1911 and a third in 1912. They were financially disastrous, 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, and although it was advertised under the name of the Camden Town Group, it may be regarded rather as the first exhibition of the London Group (see also
CUMBERLAND MARKET GROUP).
Among the artists associated with Camden Town painting in the broader sense are: Clare Atwood (1866–1962); Sylvia
Gosse; Nina
Hamnett; Anna Hope ( Nan) Hudson (1869–1967); Bevan's wife, Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952); Therese
Lessore; William
Rothenstein and his brother Albert (1881–1953), who changed his surname to Rutherson in 1914; Sir Walter Westley Russell (1867–1949); Ethel
Sands; and Marjorie Sherlock (1897–1973).
