Camden Town Group

This British Post-Impressionist-orientated group of painters developed in 1911 out of the Fitzroy Street Group and the Allied Artists Association and was led by Walter Sickert. Other members included Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner. This loose association of about fifteen painters was set up, mainly as an exhibiting society, in opposition to the renewed hostility, particularly from NEAC traditionalists that followed in the wake of the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910.

The group devoted itself to painting working-class scenes and subjects, and its name reflected the area of London featured so often by Sickert in his paintings. Membership was restricted to sixteen and, on the insistence of Harold Gilman, women were excluded. Although the aim was to emulate the style and techniques of the French Post-Impressionists, particularly in the use of pure colour, the group, unlike its Scottish counterparts, the Scottish Colourists, rarely managed to break away from the restrained and sombre tones for which it has become recognized. In 1913 the Camden Town Group merged with the Fitzroy Street Group and the Cumberland Market Group to form the London Group. This larger association included brothers Paul and John Nash, Wyndham Lewis, Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot and Jacob Epstein. The amalgamation of these diverse talents and styles which included Cubism and Vorticism, laid the foundations of the Modern Movement in Britain.