The Camden Town Group in Context

Commissioned from the artist by Sir Alec Martin 1935, by whom presented through the National Art Collections Fund to Tate Gallery 1958.

Unlike the portraits of Sir Alec Martin (Tate T00221) and Lady Martin (Tate T00222), this work is painted on a plain-weave linen canvas bought from Winsor and Newton, which was sized and primed with a lean white primer that extends to the cut edges. The portrait is apparently taken both from life and from a photograph. Sickert initially drew directly onto the prepared canvas with a brush in black paint to outline his image working from life. He then appears to have begun painting, as he did the other two portraits, using two tones for each colour mixed with white on his palette; a development from his camaieu preparation but with the bright colours remaining visible as the final image.

When the first painting was dry the artist applied a black grid on top, probably in order to transfer the image from the photograph. The vertical and horizontal black painted lines form crosses and squares, which are partly covered by later campaigns but are also left deliberately visible in places. The use of a photographic image for each of the three portraits is visually integrated into the work, as discussed by the artist in a newspaper article in 1931:

The paint is very lean oil applied by brush with little mixing and working on the canvas. Some of the initial black drawing lines are left visible and are used to emphasise the shadows, for example, the sitter’s left shoulder and arm, while others are reinstated or new ones added in the final stage to strengthen the image. Unlike Lady Martin (Tate T00222), the lights for each colour are not left as exposed white ground but are applied in white or near-white paint. It is likely that this work went through the same stages as the other portraits but was then worked on for longer, with a separate regime for the lights rather than a pre-planned third tone for each colour. Sickert may also have worked on areas other than the lights creating a more painterly image than the other portraits and leaving the work unvarnished.

Alec and Ada Martin had six children: three daughters, Mary, Nora (who died before her tenth birthday) and Joan, and three sons, Hugh Percy, William Alexander and Claude Phillip, the subject of Sickert’s 1935 portrait. Claude Phillip was born in 1921 and was named after his godfather, the art critic and keeper of the Wallace Collection, Sir Claude Phillips (1846–1924). In 1935 he was fourteen years old and a pupil at St Paul’s School, London.1 It is not known why Sickert painted only the Martins’ youngest son instead of the other children. The portrait forms the third of a trio with Sir Alec Martin (Tate T00221, fig.1) and Lady Martin (Tate T00222, fig.2), but is slightly smaller in size and uses a higher-keyed palette.

The portrait depicts the young boy dressed in a white open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, cream trousers and white plimsolls. He is sitting on a wall at the bottom of a flight of steps leading from the house in the background to the garden. Sir Alec Martin recalled that, unlike the portraits of himself and his wife, the portrait of his son was started in the garden of the Martins’ house, Marandellas, at Kingsgate.2 Most of the painting, however, was completed in Sickert’s studio, and the work is inscribed with the name of Sickert’s house in St Peter’s-in-Thanet, Hauteville. Lady Martin recalled that photographs were taken of her son for use in undertaking the commission and, indeed, the portrait has the feel of an informal snapshot.3 Richard Morphet has described Claude Phillip Martin as ‘at once banal and archetypal, lifelike and abstract, particular and almost banner-like, casual and timeless’ and has compared Sickert’s use of photographic material with Andy Warhol’s practice of selecting and enhancing photo-based images in his work.4 The sitter is holding a cricket bat across his lap as though he has just been called away from playing in the garden. His gaze is open and relaxed and he grins directly at the viewer, squinting slightly as though looking into the sun. Sickert’s treatment of the figure makes a feature of the harsh shadows in the creases of Claude Phillip’s trousers and the lack of detail in his face as though aestheticising and replicating the effect of halation, the blurring of an object in the glare of bright daylight.

The calm banality portrayed by the portrait is sadly at odds with the sitter’s subsequent life, sketched out in a letter to the Tate Gallery by his father.5 Claude Phillip’s final year at school coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War and on leaving education he joined up and fought with the British army in Austria. He returned from the conflict physically uninjured but his experiences as a soldier caused him to have a breakdown soon after his return and he tragically never fully recovered his health. He died in December 1979, aged fifty-eight.