Despair

The subject of this drawing is a man, wearing a waistcoat and soft flat cap, seated on a bed with his elbows leaning on his knees in an attitude of abject exhaustion and depression. His slumped pose clearly relates to that of the male figure in the oil painting, Dawn, Camden Town c.1909 (fig.1),1 Walter Sickert’s main contribution to the third and last Camden Town Group exhibition in December 1912. The picture, which was displayed under the abstruse title, Summer in Naples, depicts a naked woman on an iron bedstead looking at the back of a fully dressed man seated beside her, and is closely related to the sequence of works known as the ‘Camden Town Murder’ series. Taking as their context the brutal 1907 murder of a prostitute, Emily Dimmock, in Camden Town, the paintings paired a nude female with a clothed man to disturbing psychological effect, and attracted the lion’s share of media attention in coverage of the exhibition.2 Newspaper reviews of Dawn, Camden Town, for example, described the work as an ‘ugly, sensitive, bitter and accomplished artistry’,3 concerned with the ‘musty, flabby realities’ of ‘unstimulating realism’.4 The consensus was that Sickert was presenting a study of lower class life. Critics variously interpreted the male figure as ‘a British navvy’,5 ‘a colourless male creature’,6 ‘a quite recognisable British working-man’,7 and ‘an ordinary street-corner loafer ... suffering from some kind of internal discomfort’.8 In the painting the role of the man is translated as something sordid and disaffected, the paying client in a sexual transaction. The combination of the dark and patchy tones of Sickert’s characteristic painterly style, the juxtaposition with the corpulent nudity of the woman, and the perceived griminess of the bedroom interior are interpreted as analogous to social degradation. In the drawing, however, the same motif of the man seated on a bed carries a different quality, free from moral ambiguity. The body language of the working class male here seems suggestive of physical or mental tiredness and wretchedness, the result of a lifestyle of manual labour and economic hardship. This is reinforced by the title, Despair, and the word, ‘Fatigue’, inscribed by the artist at the bottom of the sheet.9