Camden Town Group

The Camden Town Group was a British Post-Impressionist association founded by the painter Walter Sickert in London in 1911 and named after the then-poor district of Camden Town, where Sickert lived and worked. The group had sixteen members—all men—among them Spencer Gore (its first president), Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, and Lucien Pissarro, son of Camille Pissarro. The artists absorbed the lessons of French Post-Impressionism, familiar to them through Roger Fry's exhibitions, and applied bright, broken touches of colour to the depiction of the prosaic, sometimes bleak everyday life of modern London: cramped furnished rooms, music halls, streets, and nudes in ordinary interiors. Sickert defended art's right to address the unglamorous sides of urban life. Short-lived, the group merged in 1913 with other associations into the broader London Group, yet it left a marked imprint on the emergence of British modernism.