The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased for 40 guineas (£42) from the artist via the Redfern Gallery, London, 1941.

Flask Walk, Hampstead, on Coronation Day is painted in artists’ oil paints on a commercially prepared canvas. The cloth appears to be fine plain-weave linen and bears the faint trace of an artists’ colourman stamp centred on the back. The distinctive oval format of the stamp matches that of a Reeves & Sons Prepared Canvas. The cloth appears to have been sized and primed with a white probably oil-based primer, which extends to the edges of the canvas and retains the canvas weave texture. It is attached to a four-member stretcher with coated steel tacks, which remain in their original positions. The dimensions of the canvas conform to a standard commercial size, historically known as ‘head size’ indicating that the support was purchased pre-stretched from the colourman. Like most of Ginner’s paintings, the canvas has planar distortions, due to the weight and the drying properties of the thick paint film. They are not particularly pronounced in this case, and have not resulted in structural problems, as they have in other of his works (see Tate N05306).

Ginner apparently used a home-made view-finder to aid in the composition of his pictures. It consisted of a rectangular cardboard frame measuring 110 x 90 mm, which was strung with black and white cotton threads to form a grid.1 The device relates directly to his preparatory drawings, which he habitually squared up with a black or sometimes red ink grid. There is no visible trace of any initial drawing beneath the paint film, although there is a squared-up preparatory study for the picture (Tate T01099). He would have carefully transferred the design from his drawing to the primed canvas in faint pencil, which would now be difficult to detect beneath the paint.2 The picture is painted with opaque mixtures of artists’ oil paints applied at a consistent viscosity, so that the dried paint retains the softened brush-marking. There are some variations in thickness and texture of paint across the canvas. Colour was applied in just one or two overlapping layers in the sky and worked rhythmically to give a sense of movement to the clouds. This produced a surface with less texture than the rest of the painting. In comparison, the accumulation of overlaid brushstrokes used to describe the decorations, figures and buildings produced a more layered and busily textured surface. In these areas, the paint is methodically built up in layers with minimum intermixing with underlying or adjacent paint even where painted wet-in-wet. Typical of this is the dark wall in the foreground on the right. The brickwork is underpainted in a relatively thin dark umber upon which the grid of mortar is painted and each brick then rendered with usually a single brush stroke of thick paint. This accumulation of detail upon detail produces a highly textured and intricate surface where each application of paint remains distinct. The paint film has localised areas of drying crackle, which are characteristic of Ginner’s work (see also Tate T03096). A thin film of varnish appears to have been applied but has been almost totally absorbed by the paint, suggesting that it was applied when the painting was partially dried and that there may be additional medium present that is compatible with the varnish (see also Tate N05306).

The view is from the first-floor windows of Ginner’s house at 61 Hampstead High Street. It shows the decorations put up in the street opposite, Flask Walk, for the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937. Ginner had moved to this house in 1919, occupying the four floors above the shop, but he painted the view most frequently just before he left in 1938, depicting the view on Guy Fawkes Day and under snow, both also in 1937.1 These views differ very slightly, perhaps because the room had three windows, but they also differ in focus. In the snow painting, Flask Walk is seen much closer, and it may be that Ginner used some kind of telescope.

The street signs are all partly cut off; they include on the left a notice for Hampstead Station Underground, Wills’s Gold Flake Cigarettes and Flask Pharmacy, and on the right the Flask Tavern, a butcher and Greens, an electrical shop. The Salvation Army hall is on the right. In the centre is a banner with an enlarged photograph of George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The preparatory drawing for this painting was given to the Tate Gallery in 1968 (Tate T01099, fig.1). The design is so detailed as to suggest that Ginner used some optical device. From observation and photographs of the street, it does not seem likely that he could have seen all that he includes from a single viewpoint.

Ginner drew and painted Flask Walk on numerous occasions from his windows, in such works as Flask Walk – Night 1922 (Cooper Gallery, Barnsley),2 Flask Walk, Rain c.1924 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford),3 Flask Walk 1928 (Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester),4 Flask Walk, Hampstead, under Snow c.1930,5 Flask Walk, Skyline 1934 (Aberdeen Art Gallery),6 Flask Walk, Winter 1937 (private collection)7 and Flask Walk, Fifth November 1936 (private collection).8 A version was praised by the art critic Frank Rutter at a New English Art Club exhibition in 1923, in terms that apply to the Tate’s 1937 painting:

The Times critic in 1954 concluded that despite Ginner’s realism, ‘the paintings seem to have been inspired not so much by the immediate contact with life as by intimations of nostalgia’, making Ginner ‘more a romantic than a realist’.10 The critic mentioned this painting as an example, and wrote that seeing it ‘bedecked with flags for the Coronation’ it was the art of L.S. Lowry that ‘comes to mind’.11

The art historian Malcolm Easton described the effect of colour and texture in this painting:

The depiction of deep perspective is remarkable, since the bunting and flags seen mostly head-on are at such varied distances, some extremely close. The bunting must have been part of the decorations running down Hampstead High Street, immediately in front of Ginner’s windows, as the rope runs on past the street entrance. The view is centred on the banner showing the new king and queen, though their grey colours hardly show against the flags. Ginner does not seem to have been especially royalist or conservative, so far as can be assumed from the subjects of his pictures and the recollections of friends. The coronation was a subject of great popular interest and public attitudes to the event at a time of national and international crisis became a theme for Mass Observation research. The painting itself is true to Ginner’s ‘Neo-Realist’ creed, and is a distant continuation of views of Paris streets with flags painted by Edouard Manet and Camille Pissarro. The emphasis, apart from the colour, is on four adults and a child walking the streets.

In Ginner’s second notebook this painting is titled both Flask Walk, 12 May 1937 and Coronation Day 1937.13 He lists the exhibition of 1939 at Liège, for which no catalogue has been found.