La Vieille Balayeuse, Dieppe

The title of this painting translates from the French as The Old Street Sweeper, Dieppe. The line of a tall lamp-post leads the viewer’s eye down towards the sweeper, positioned in the centre foreground of the composition, as the focus of the painting. Behind her a small crowd is gathered on the pavement; the heads of a few people behind the group face outwards, suggesting that they are selling produce, most probably fish, to the rest. The presence of the electric light dominating the middle ground in favour of the smaller gas lamp suggests an encroaching modernity to this traditional market scene.

Characteristically for Ginner, the fore-, middle- and backgrounds are painted in almost the same level of detail and focus, with tiles on the roofs in the background individually articulated. A sense of depth is created instead by the use of pale hues in the background in contrast to stronger colours in the foreground. Influenced by Vincent van Gogh, Ginner often used complementary colours in his work. In this case, purple and yellow are the most prominent, while the bright red of the young woman’s jacket on the right complements the green of the apron of a small girl who stands in the crowd, thus uniting the two; their poses mirror one another also.

The location of the scene is the Fish Market beside the Avant Port where the Arc Poissonnerie and the Quai Henri IV meet in the town of Dieppe in northern France.1 The houses in the background on the Quai Henri IV are depicted accurately, as can be seen in photographs from the time.2 The sweeper is using a typical French street broom made out of tied twigs of birch or broom. Traditionally, pavements would be swept in a swinging gesture, picking up water from the gutter to brush the damp head onto the pavement in a rhythmic fashion.3

The scene encompasses a diverse range of people in age, class and work in a similar fashion to Ginner’s Piccadilly Circus of 1912 (Tate T03096). To the left of the painting an old fisherwoman in traditional working clothes and apron stands with hands on hips facing out of the picture with a large fish basket on her back; on the right a young, middle class woman in modern smart clothes, who may be a tourist, faces in the opposite direction. Together with the sweeper, they create a triangular formation. The casual poses of the other figures, with men in working clothes standing with hands in pockets, creates an atmosphere of working class life similar to Robert Bevan’s paintings of crowds at horse sales in such works as Horse Sale at the Barbican 1912 (Tate N04750, fig.1) and Under the Hammer 1914 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).4