Walter Bayes

In a letter to the Tate Gallery written in 1954, Walter Bayes explained that Under the Candles: Mr Charles Ginner Presiding was a study for an oil painting exhibited at the Royal Academy.1 He added that his painting had been ‘dreadfully skied’ during display, meaning that it had been hung so high that it was virtually impossible to see it. Since the study is dated 1933 and Bayes did not exhibit at the Academy between 1931 and 1935, Mary Chamot, an Assistant Keeper at the Tate Gallery, reasoned that the picture must have been the work entitled La Vie Galante – ‘On Sonne’ (The Gentlemanly Life – ‘Someone Rings the Bell’),2 exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1936.3 The appearance and whereabouts of this painting are currently unknown but the title does not seem to bear much relation to the appearance and subject of Under the Candles. However, as the art historian Wendy Baron has pointed out, Bayes did have a tendency to give his works obscure titles with cryptic meanings.4 It is possible that the French title has a colloquial meaning which has been lost owing to translation or the passage of time.

Under the Candles: Mr Charles Ginner Presiding depicts the crowded interior of a room in a casino, structured by arches and columns and lit by low, green-fringed lampshades and a large electric chandelier. The harsh lighting cast by these light sources creates bright highlights on the sheen of fabric and jewellery which Bayes has depicted with acidic colours and bold touches of gouache, painted over an underdrawing of crosshatched pencil lines, characteristic of his drawing technique. The foreground is dominated by one long gaming table around which are grouped a number of men and women participating in the gambling. The artist Charles Ginner is probably the man standing on the left of the table, leaning forward with both hands placed beside the wheel. As a young man, Ginner’s character and looks were reportedly rather dashingly French, and this is how he appears in a portrait by Malcolm Drummond of 1911 (fig.1). In 1933, however, he would have been fifty-five and his appearance was rather altered. His friend Marjorie Lilly recorded that he was a ‘thick-set, sturdy, short-necked man with a round, bald head and a bun-shaped face’,5 a description which is confirmed by other contemporary depictions of Ginner such as Portrait of Charles Ginner 1930 (fig.2) by Edward Le Bas. No other portraits have been identified within the work.