CAMDEN TOWN GROUP
Camden Town Group, a group of English Post-Impressionist artists who met on a weekly basis in the studio of the painter Walter Richard Sickert (31 May 1860–22 January 1942) in Camden Town in London. Upon Sickert’s return to London from Venice in 1905, Harold John Wilde Gilman (11 February 1876-12 February 1919), Frederick Spencer Gore (26 May 1878-27 March 1914), Lucien Camille Pissarro (20 February 1863–10 July 1944), Augustus Edwin John (4 January 1878-31 October 1961), Henry Lamb (21 June 1883–8 October 1960), James Bolivar Manson (26 June 1879–3 July 1945), Robert Polhill Bevan (5 August 1865–8 July 1925), Walter John Bayes (31 May 1869–21 January 1956), and Charles Isaac Ginner (4 March 1878-6 January 1952), all recent visitors to Paris, assembled at Sickert’s studio. Their meetings brought a sense of French bohemianism into the English art world of the time and when art critic Francis Vane Phipson Rutter (17 February 1876–18 April 1937) joined the group in 1908, he proposed that the group organise itself after the French Salon des Indépendants. They thus formed the Allied Artists Association, which was independent of the established art societies such as the Royal Academy and in 1908 the association held its exhibits of French and English Post-Impressionism at the Royal Albert Hall. In 1911 Sickert’s circle officially became the Camden Town Group when one of its sixteen members was John Doman Turner. At the three important exhibitions held at the Carfax Gallery sponsored by the Camden Town Group in 1911 and 1912, early French Fauve and Cubist paintings were introduced to the public. The Camden Town artists were also open to the influence of Post-Impressionists such as Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848–8 May 1903) and Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839–22 October 1906) and because the group was primarily interested in pictorial structure, it particularly turned to Cézanne for inspiration. Their subject matter was derived from the everyday life of an English industrial town. Despite an expressive use of colour, their paintings remained representational and realistic, reflecting an interpretation of a modern aesthetic different from the more formally daring developments emerging in Paris at the same time. In 1913 The Camden Town Group was absorbed by the London Group of Artists, a combination of several smaller groups of contemporary English artists.