The Camden Town Group in Context

Savile Gallery by 1930; ... ; purchased at the Adams Gallery, London, November 1949 by John W. Blyth (1873–1962), Kirkcaldy; sold by order of his legatees Sotheby’s, London, 15 April 1964 (19), bought Ellis for £300; sold Sotheby’s, London, 15 December 1965 (31) for £140; ... ; Mrs Behr, her sale, Sotheby’s, London, 23 April 1969 (25), bought D. Gray for £200; ... ; David Praed, from whom bought by Lady Simone Warner 1969; her sale Christie’s, London, 10 June 1988 (359), bought in at £3,200; her sale Christie’s, London, 3 March 1989 (315), bought Tate Gallery for £3,345.

This oil sketch is painted on a commercially prepared canvas purchased from the artists’ colourmen L. Cornelissen & Son. The linen cloth has very coarse and open plain weave and has been prepared with a little glue size and a dense opaque white primer composed of lead white mixed with chalk and zinc white. The primer extends to the cut edges and retains the strong weave texture. The canvas appears to have been re-stretched to improve the tension, possibly by the artist, but more likely later.

Sickert painted an apparently simple linear drawing onto the white ground using thinned black oil paint and a stiff brush. It has some of the consistency of ink but is much thicker and was more viscous when wet. There is no sign of any initial pencil drawing and this would be inconsistent with the confidence and fluidity of the caricature. The black drawing is highly stylised and spontaneous but is reworked in a few areas, such as the tablecloth, the legs and the feet of the figures. On closer examination it appears to have a more tentative and leaner line underneath which is visible in many areas. These black lines are drier and only impact on the canvas-weave tops, perhaps by keeping the paint on the brush without solvent. This is probably Sickert’s first stage of drawing. In a later series of lectures he delivered at the Margate School of Art he outlined the importance of these early stages of working:

The artist has blocked in between the lines with patches of paint to depict areas of light and shade and to indicate the local colour. There is a wide range of colours, though none particularly strong: cool pink, green, pale blue, dull orange, dull yellows, greys, browns and darker pinks. The background yellow has two separate applications of different tones, indicating that there may have been two separate stages of painting, although drying time may not have been necessary, except for the yellow, since in general the paint was applied so sparingly. The coloured paint is applied by brush, prepared on a palette with little subsequent dwelling or mixing on the canvas. The application leaves some soft impasto. Sickert may have added more medium or solvent to his paint to improve its flow and the oil ground is not particularly absorbent. Like the black paint, areas of colour on the floor, for example, are applied dryly across the canvas texture creating a broken line. The drawn black lines remain visible to dominate the composition, presumably in imitation of the original work by John Gilbert, and some are applied on top of later paint. There is a thin overall glossy varnish which has been crudely brushed on, leaving runs on the bottom tacking edge; it is probably not original.

This picture is from the series Walter Sickert made in the late 1920s and early 1930s which he described as ‘Echoes’. They were mainly copied from Victorian illustrations which he found in old editions of the Illustrated London News and similar publications; he made in all around a hundred such works. Sickert took The Seducer from a design by Sir John Gilbert (1818–1897), which is acknowledged in the inscription. The published source for the design remains unidentified. Sickert made more Echoes after Gilbert than after anyone else. The artist William Rothenstein wrote of the Echoes:

When Sickert had an exhibition at the Savile Gallery in March 1930 that included eight Echoes, among them The Seducer, responses were mixed. His friend Ethel Sands reported that there were ‘one or two good ones but mostly things from old caricatures which are desperately silly’.2 Similarly, the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell judged them ‘idiotic’ and claimed they fell ‘between so many stools they hardly exist’.3 But in Apollo, the critic T.W. Earp praised them as

Sir Osbert Sitwell, who knew Sickert well, described the genesis of the Echoes, writing how the artist’s

John Gilbert was born in Blackheath and studied under George Lance (1802–1864), who had been a pupil of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). As a young man Sickert knew Gilbert, and revered him both as a great artist and as a link with the past. In a lecture given at the Margate School of Art on 26 October 1934, taken down in shorthand by one of the students, he recalled his first meeting with Gilbert:

Sickert was sent to see Gilbert by the Pall Mall Budget in 1893, for which, as he related, he made a number of portrait illustrations. His drawing of Gilbert appeared in the magazine on 13 April 1893.7

When the exhibition of Echoes was held at the Leicester Galleries in May 1931, Sickert included an appendix in the catalogue in which he described the artists from whom he had taken designs. Of Gilbert he wrote:

When Leicester Art Gallery purchased Sickert’s Echo, The Bart and the Bums,9 in 1931, Sickert wrote to them explaining something of this picture and the series in general. The letter further reveals his feelings about Gilbert, and his motivation in making the Echoes. After recalling his commission to draw Gilbert, Sickert wrote:

The important collector John Blyth was an early owner of The Seducer. In his first thirty years of collecting, Blyth bought only the work of Scottish artists, but in the 1940s and 1950s he turned his attention to English art, in particular the Camden Town Group. He owned pictures by Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and a total of twenty-four works by Sickert. Blyth played an active role at Kirkcaldy Art Gallery in Fife, having up to half his large collection on loan there at any one time as well as chairing the art committee. Following his death, 128 works from his collection were purchased for Kirkcaldy.11 Kirkcaldy Art Gallery never exhibited The Seducer and according to their records it appears to have remained in Blyth’s drawing room at Wilby House, Kirkcaldy.