The Camden Town Group in Context

ISBN 978-1-84976-385-1

Charles Ginner Study for 'Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day' 1937

This careful drawing was made from Ginner’s desk on the first floor of his house at 61 Hampstead High Street. A preparatory study for the oil painting Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day (Tate N05276), it is squared up for transfer to canvas with heavy ink lines in a half-inch grid. Watercolour has been applied to sections of the view that Ginner would not see again, such as the flags and the clothes of passers-by.
Charles Ginner 1878–1952
Study for ‘Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day’
1937
Graphite, watercolour and ink on paper
445 x 315 mm
Inscribed ‘Wills Gold Flake Cigarettes’ and other indistinct lettering, the squares numbered on all four sides, and ‘OIL BOUGHT BY | THE TATE GALLERY’ lower right
Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1968
T01099

Entry

This is a squared-up preparatory study for Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day (Tate N05276, fig.1), and different in kind to a finished exhibition drawing by Ginner, such as his view from the attic of the same house entitled From a Hampstead Window 1923 (Tate N03873, fig.2). This study is not recorded in his notebooks, which only include works made for exhibition.1 The squares are on a grid of half an inch, with the drawn area exactly 12 x 10 inches. Ginner added watercolour to the flags, decorations and clothes only, choosing the parts of the view that he would not see again. The vertical lines of the buildings were first drawn with a ruler and then traced freehand in pencil. The painting follows this drawing almost exactly, the only noticeable alteration being that in the painting the running child at the bottom right does not hold a flag in her hand.
Charles Ginner 'Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day' 1937
Fig.1
Charles Ginner
Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day 1937
Tate N05276
© Tate
Charles Ginner 'From a Hampstead Window' 1923
Fig.2
Charles Ginner
From a Hampstead Window 1923
Tate N03873
© Tate

The view is from Ginner’s desk on the first floor of his house at 61 Hampstead High Street in north London. It can be seen again including the top of this desk with his windowsill crowded with china, a vase of flowers, a notebook and other objects, in a drawing entitled Flask Walk, Rain (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).2
The alignment of the buildings in this drawing is slightly different in some places. The room from which he was sketching has three windows, and it seems that Ginner drew slightly different views from these windows, one for each side of the street, looking from the left towards the right and vice versa. The depiction of Flask Walk in the drawing is much closer than it is in reality, especially as the fronts of the houses in Hampstead High Street have been cut off at the right and almost cut off at the left. Ginner’s drawing of the numbers of courses of bricks beside the windows is not accurate.

David Fraser Jenkins
May 2005

Notes

1
The notebooks are in the collection of the Tate Archive, TGA 9319.
2
Pen, black ink and watercolour, 346 x 233 mm; reproduced as 1930s in More Than a Glance, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, London 1980, p.34.

How to cite

David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Study for ‘Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day’ 1937 by Charles Ginner’, catalogue entry, May 2005, in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/charles-ginner-study-for-flask-walk-hampstead-on-coronation-day-r1139017, accessed 06 December 2024.