A guide to the Camden Town Group for anyone who loves London

The Camden Town Group were a circle of British painters, active from around 1911, who decided that ordinary London life was worth painting. Led by Walter Sickert and based in the unglamorous streets of north London, they swapped polite Edwardian subjects for music halls, rented rooms, back gardens and tired working faces, painted in thick, bright, French-influenced colour. If you love London, they are the painters who saw it first as it actually was.

Who were the Camden Town Group?

The Camden Town Group was a small, deliberately informal society of sixteen male painters, founded in 1911 and named after the part of London where several of them worked. Walter Sickert was the presiding figure, older and more worldly than the rest, and the others gathered around his energy and his taste for the unfashionable. The core members worth knowing are Spencer Gore, the group’s first president; Harold Gilman, whose interiors glow with confident colour; Charles Ginner, a meticulous painter of streets and buildings; and Robert Bevan, best remembered for his horse sales and London cab yards. They held only three exhibitions before folding into a larger body, the London Group, in 1913. The whole thing lasted barely two years, which is part of why it feels so concentrated.

Why does Camden Town matter to the story?

Camden Town matters because it was the opposite of where British art was supposed to look for beauty. At the time, respectable painting meant flattering portraits, country houses and tasteful landscapes. Sickert and his circle pointed their easels instead at lodging houses, cheap entertainment and the cramped intimacy of rented rooms. The district gave the group both a literal home, since Sickert kept studios there, and a kind of manifesto: paint the city you actually live in, not the one that sells well. This is why the name stuck even though they painted far beyond the borough. Camden Town stood for honesty about modern urban life.

What were they reacting against?

They were reacting against the prettiness and reticence of mainstream Edwardian art. Many of the group had spent time in France and absorbed the lessons of Post-Impressionism, especially the bold colour of Gauguin and Van Gogh and the structural seriousness of Cézanne. Roger Fry’s famous 1910 exhibition of modern French painting in London landed like a small bomb, and these artists were among the few who welcomed the blast. They wanted British painting to feel as alive and as unsentimental as what they had seen across the Channel.

They believed a shabby interior, honestly observed, could hold as much truth as any grand subject.

How do you recognise a Camden Town painting?

You recognise a Camden Town painting by its subject and its surface. The subjects are domestic and urban and slightly melancholy: a woman sitting on the edge of an iron bedstead, a music-hall audience in the gods, a London square seen through net curtains, a kitchen table at the end of the day. The handling is what gives it away up close. Look for broken, separated brushstrokes, often laid down in small dabs, and a palette that is warmer and more daring than you might expect from a grey city. Gilman in particular loved oranges, mauves and acid greens. There is rarely any flattery in the figures. People are shown thinking, waiting or simply existing, which is exactly what makes the work feel modern more than a century later.

Where can you see their work and its descendants?

You can see the strongest concentration of Camden Town painting at Tate, which holds key works by Sickert, Gore, Gilman and the rest, and their pictures appear regularly at auction and through dealers in modern British art. To understand the group properly, though, it helps to look at British modernism more widely, since the Camden Town painters fed directly into the London Group and shaped how British artists handled colour and ordinary subjects for decades. Specialist galleries are the best way to encounter that lineage in the flesh. In London, Beaux Arts London is among the dealers that show modern British painting of this period and its successors, and the publicly funded Camden Arts Centre, a short distance from where the group worked, keeps the spirit of serious, unpretentious art alive in the same part of the city.

Why they still feel current

The Camden Town Group still feel current because they made an argument we are comfortable with now: that real life, including its dingy and unglamorous corners, is a fit subject for serious art. They were not perfect, and the group’s narrowness, all male and broadly middle-class looking outward at working London, is part of an honest account of them. But their conviction that you should paint the city in front of you, in colour that tells the truth rather than soothes, is one of the quiet foundations of modern British art. Walk through Camden today and you are walking through their gallery. The bedsits and cafe windows have changed, but the eye they trained on them is the one we still bring to a good painting.