Study of a Girl

Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot was one of the founder members of the Camden Town Group, but only exhibited at the first exhibition in June 1911. He was a recent, very talented, graduate from the Slade School of Fine Art and, with James Dickson Innes, was the youngest artist to be asked to join the group, probably invited by Spencer Gore. Unlike most of the other members, Lightfoot was not a pupil or follower of either Walter Sickert or of post-impressionism and, as an almost complete unknown, may only have been using the Camden Town Group platform as an opportunity to get his work exhibited in public rather than sharing in their overall aesthetic outlook. His work was wholly unlike anything else in the exhibition, a fact which was picked up by many reviewers who, although largely admiring of his work, were puzzled by his inclusion. Two paintings in particular from the four he exhibited, an oil, Boy with a Hoop. Frank c.1911 (fig.1), and another oil, in tondo format, Mother and Child c.1911 (private collection),1 were singled out for praise, especially by those critics who were uneasy with the bright colours and experimental style of Gore, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan, or the sordid, murky interiors of Sickert’s Camden Town Murder paintings. The World went so far as to write that Lightfoot’s paintings alone were the ‘only contributions that have serious claim to be regarded as works of art’,2 and the Daily Telegraph maintained that his work ‘was assuredly the most interesting that the exhibition has to show’.3 The Morning Post described Lightfoot’s drawings as ‘powerful’, and suggested that this ‘William Orpen in the making’ was ‘not going to remain satisfied with the light, rather precarious, painting of the Camden Town Group’.4

This prediction proved to be correct. Not only was Lightfoot’s work stylistically and thematically very different to that produced by the other members of the Camden Town Group, but he had little respect or admiration for his fellow artists and their output. In a revealing letter to his Slade contemporary, Rudolph Ihlee (1883–1968), Lightfoot wrote: