Modern Painters

The Camden Town Group of British painters chronicled the changes in both British society and the rapidly developing city of London in the years immediately before and during the First World War. The best known of the Group were Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner and Walter Sickert. All of them focused on modernity and metropolitan existence, in an age when the horse-drawn cab was being replaced with the motor-car, and which saw the development of new, utopian garden cities like Letchworth in the unchanging rural landscapes of Britain's countryside.Accompanying the first major exhibition of the Camden Town Group for twenty years, this book will explore how these radically modern artists reflected the immense change that was taking place around them.
Individual chapters will explore how European influences were absorbed and refined; how painting portraits of themselves and each other were a way of creating a group identity and working out rivalries; how genre portraits of working-class subjects allowed them to explore the relationship of the individual and the city; and, how Sickert, Gore and Gilman in particular created images of women that were more overtly sexual in content than anything being produced over the Channel.Lavishly illustrated throughout, this book will serve to return the Camden Town Group to their rightful place in British art history as a radically innovative movement who provided a powerful portrait of a nation in transition.