Walter Bayes

Although Walter Bayes has now fallen into relative obscurity, many reviewers of the three Camden Town Group exhibitions expressed positive views of his work. Some of the more conservative critics preferred his paintings to those of his now more famous colleagues. The general consensus was summed up by A.J. Finberg, who wrote during the third Carfax Gallery exhibition: ‘What on earth he [Bayes] is doing or proposes to do in such a gallery is no doubt only his affair, but at least he has serious and definite aims as a painter’.1 Many reviewers were unable to comprehend Bayes’s inclusion in a gallery of artists from whom he was so obviously different in style and outlook, but almost all praised his intellectually sound approach to composition, colour and design and the decorative appeal of his paintings. The Pall Mall Gazette declared that Bayes was ‘very decidedly among the freshest and brightest influences in current painting’,2 whilst the Morning Post called him ‘one of the most brilliant of our younger men ... No other painter exhibiting is more respectful of his technical accomplishment than Mr. Bayes.’3

Tate’s The Ford is the second of two versions of the subject by the artist. The first version was painted during the First World War and was exhibited by William Marchant at the Goupil Gallery in ‘that window looking on to Lower Regent St. which for so long was the best place in London for showing pictures’.4 Despite its advantageous display spot, however, it failed to attract a buyer and was subsequently taken to Arthur Clifton at the Carfax Gallery who suggested that it should be titled ‘The Ford’ and sent to the Royal Academy in 1917. In a letter to the Tate Gallery, Bayes wrote in 1953: