The

Theme of Melancholy and Nostalgia within the Landscape Paintings of the Camden Town Group in Comparison with other Post-Impressionist Artists.
KH190 090268647 Kelly Buckley
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Contents

Introduction 3 Chapter One Melancholy and Nostalgia 8 What is Melancholy? 8 The History of Melancholy and its Meaning 10 The Importance of Melancholy in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras 14 Identifying Personal and Cultural Melancholy 19 Melancholy in History of Art 25 Chapter Two Camden Town Group: A Brief History and Contextualisation 30 Who Were the Camden Town Group? 30 Inspiration and Technique 31 The Camden Town Group Subject 33 Disagreement and Division 36 Personal Melancholy and the End of the Camden Town Group 37 Chapter Three An Analysis of Melancholy and Nostalgia within the Landscape Paintings of the Camden Town Group in Comparison with other Post-Impressionist Artists 39 i) An Analysis of Melancholy in the Cityscape 39 ii) An Analysis of Melancholy in the Modern Country Landscape 47 iii) An Analysis of Childhood Nostalgia and Melancholy 56 iv) An Analysis of Social Nostalgia in the Traditional Country Landscape 66 Conclusion 73 Bibliography 77

Introduction

Figure 1. Spencer Gore, Gauguins and Connoisseurs, 1911. Oil on canvas (83.8 x 71.7 cm) Private Collection. 3

 In 1910, the English art critic Roger Fry, held a seminal exhibition in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. It was to forge the way in showcasing modern European art in Britain.1 Then in 1911, an English artist by the name of Spencer Gore, decided to celebrate this event in a painting called Gauguins and Conoisseurs [Figure 1] His depiction of the event shows a lively crowd of visitors embracing a new movement of art developed by the Post-Impressionist masters Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh. Gore, like his artistic colleagues, had long held a fascination with this art, which had preceded the British publics knowledge of its existence.2 It was around the time of this exhibition, that a group of men sought to depict their own land in the style of their idols and so the Camden Town Group was born. The Camden Town Groups place within the history of British art has unfortunately been somewhat ignored and understated. Yet their art is a curious narrative on the experiences of British culture, which laid importance on both the landscape in the city and the country. Furthermore, the group have often been evaluated as celebrators of the city and that their importance only lies herewith. In reality, there is a strong case for an exploration of melancholy and nostalgia within these painters works. Melancholia was an unavoidable part of British culture, which had developed out of the Victorian era as a result of the negative effects of modernisation. Nostalgia became part of a remedy in which to alleviate these problems within society. Within an analysis of their works, it shall be seen that these artists trod a line on which they could use the 1 Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain 1910-1914 (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1997), p. 8. 2 Judith Terry, Tobi Bruce, Janice Anderson and Danielle Chaput, Lasting Impressions: Celebrated Works of the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2005), p. 82. 4

creative, colourful and experimental style of the Post-Impressionists and apply it to a melancholic or nostalgic subject. What shall be argued here is that there is much to be said about the similar subjects which the Camden Town Group and Post-Impressionists portrayed. It was not just stylistically in which the two artistic eras shared a common theme. French society was undergoing modernisation, perhaps later than England but nevertheless, that curiously created similar feelings of melancholy and nostalgia within their culture. It is however, noteworthy that the Post-Impressionists appeared to involve more of their personal feelings within their work than perhaps did the Camden Town Group. This is understandable, for the group worked together, whereas the Post-Impressionists, although grouped under such a name, did not collaborate as a group in the same way. To gather a full understanding of the circumstances of these works and what this thesis will mean by melancholy and nostalgia, the first chapter will seek a thorough evaluation of its meaning in its social and personal context, its history, its importance in the Victorian and Edwardian era and its significance in art history. From here, we shall see just how important melancholy was culturally and therefore be able to comprehend how it is reflected in art in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter shall give a brief contextualisation of the Camden Town Group, its history, technique and subject. As an artistic group which is rarely written about in any great detail, this will allow the Camden Town Group to be evaluated in regard to their significance and why they are being analysed against other Post-Impressionist artists. There are four main areas where this thesis shall explore a connection through subject, and evaluate their different, sometimes similar explorations of personal and social melancholy, as well as that of nostalgia. By comparing through subject and

theme, this thesis can focus on the personal and cultural connections which these artists shared, not merely from a stylistic point of view. Chapter three shall evaluate melancholy within the cityscape, for this subject is perhaps what the Camden Town Group are best remembered for and so provides a springboard for the subject. This chapter shall find a shared appreciation of melancholia and a personal reflection on the subject that differs quite significantly. Chapter four will progress into the country landscape, an area of work for which the Camden Town Group are largely forgotten. Here a focus on the impact of industrialisation within the countryside will be discussed, where again we see a shared passion for a common subject. Interestingly both display a common desire to oppose cultural opinion, yet personal reflection divides. Chapter five moves into childhood nostalgia, where we depart from subject comparison onto a common cultural and personal theme. Here, two works which appear so different, share a deep expression of both personal and cultural nostalgia that reflects society in their respective periods. Finally, chapter six shall explore the cultural nostalgia of the country landscape, which perhaps finds the most similarities between artists in this thesis. Both exploring personal expressions of appreciation whilst sharing a nostalgic culture which was apparent both in England and France. What shall be discovered upon analysis is that the Camden Town Group found beauty in both city and country, despite any underlying cultural melancholy. Sometimes however, by attempting to project innocence, such as in an expression of cultural nostalgia, the viewer still sees the melancholy that they are attempting to hide. Personal expression, sometimes reflective of cultural views, sometimes not, comes across strongly through symbolism and style. They learnt well from their Post-

Impressionist predecessors, that technique and palette could inform a personal expression, to either reflect or challenge cultural opinion. Colour could bring beauty to a city deeply representative of cultural melancholy, where colour could also adequately express the nostalgic beauty of the countryside. Side by side with their artistic idols, they shared an appreciation of the melancholic subject and expressing their own personal opinion through the paintbrush. French and English culture sometimes differs, sometimes they converge, much like the opinions of the Camden Town Group and the Post-Impressionists.

 What is Melancholy?

CHAPTER ONE

Defining melancholy is a complex and rather overwhelming task. As is the way of the English language, words have changed and evolved their meaning over time. Melancholy is no exception. Today, its definition as a noun is given as a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause, another term for melancholia (a mental condition) or historical: another term for black bile.3 The experience of melancholy can be a very personal experience. 4 It is quite often described as a mood, which in itself is a feeling that can differ from person to person. Harvie Ferguson has written that the word itself remains an embarrassment to modern thought.5 When we explore melancholy within paintings in Chapter 3, we must keep in mind that melancholy can be a very personal experience. Where you may see it, another may not. Where melancholy will be most relevant to this dissertation, will be its understanding as a shared feeling. The lucidity with which this term has today, means it can be adapted to describe everything which is peculiar to the modern world. During the lifetime of our artists, which includes the latter Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, melancholy had a more substantial place within societys culture. As David G. Riede writes, Victorian melancholy is historically specific to Victorian

3 Oxford English Dictionary, Melancholy, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/melancholy (accessed 15 February 2012). 4 Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Sren Kierkegaards Religious Psychology (London: Routledge, 1995), p. XVI. 5 Ibid. 8

culture.6 It became entwined and complex within the Victorian mind, a result of the consistently evolving and industrial nature of their world. An important sub chapter of melancholy, which is crucial for an understanding of Victorian life, is the experience of nostalgia. The Oxford English dictionary describes this experience today as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past or something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia.7 Many writers of the subject appreciate nostalgia as an important factor within the culture and arts of today. Bonnets extensive analysis of nostalgia within politics, has pin pointed several writers who share an awareness of nostalgia and its standing in modern culture. One of those most recent writers, Glazer, wrote of what he called a global epidemic of nostalgia.8 Furthermore, Fred Davis, ten years earlier, noted that nostalgia is very much in vogue these days.9 In a fast and mobile society, nostalgia is an important part of our psychology, culture and politics. As a result, we can fully appreciate the culture of nostalgia that was preeminent in Victorian and Edwardian society: the society of which the Camden Town Group and the Post-Impressionists were very much part of. We too yearn for the past as we face an often difficult and ever fast changing present. Yet to fully understand the place melancholy had within the paintings we are to explore, a greater understanding of its history and significance is fundamental. 6 David Reide, Allegories of Ones Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), p. 7. 7 Oxford English Dictionary, Nostalgia, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nostalgia (accessed 15 February 2012). 8 P. Glazer, Radical Nostalgia (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), p. 35. 9 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. viii. 9

The History of Melancholy and its Meaning We must be wary of the changing definition of melancholy, for it can mean something entirely different to us today than it did in the time of the Camden Town Group. What makes the subject of melancholy, within the Camden Town Group and Post- Impressionist work so fascinating, is that the meaning of the word reached a milestone in its definition at the time in which they were alive and working. For the Post- Impressionists, melancholy and its separation from medical depression was reaching a climax during the late nineteenth-century. Nostalgia was also taking on important cultural significance. To appreciate the significance of these changes and its importance by the time of the Camden Town Group, we must delve further into the words meaning prior to this artistic era and trace its development. Until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the term melancholy appears to cover a number of things, including fleeting moods, mental disorders ranging from severe to very mild, normal reactions, and long term character traits.10 This can be gathered from Samuel Johnsons dictionary of 1775, where melancholy is described as having several meanings, with two references to different medical disorders and a third to more common states of melancholy.11 Melancholia described a wide range of

10 Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4. 11 Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words Are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. 9th ed.4 vols (London: Longman, [1755] 1805) as quoted in Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, p. 5. 10

medical disorders such as apoplexy and epilepsy, as well as partial insanity, which was seen as a less severe form of full madness. 12 The term depression was not to come into common use until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is relatively recent in its history then, that melancholy has lost its connotations of mental illness, rather than its more common use today as a term used to express pensive sadness.13 The break depression made with the term melancholy occurred around the same time as the Romantic idea of melancholy, as a subjective state, was flowering.14 It is acknowledged that the birth of modern psychiatry partly came about with the documentation of manic-depressive illness by Emil Kraepelin in his 1899 textbook on psychiatry.15 Today, it is acknowledged that we owe much of our conceptualisation of the illness to the physiatrist.16 Therefore, the complexity and ambiguity of the term melancholy was being somewhat resolved by the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in scientific terms. In the arts, Linda M. Austin has alluded to literature to present the theory that the break between melancholy and bereavement, on one side, and the bittersweet pleasure of remembering loss on the other occurred well before it happened in the medical world.17 She looks to a poem by Schiller, written in 1784, where he writes the May of life blooms once and not again; it has ceased to bloom for me.18 Austin reads 12 Radden, The Nature, p. 5. 13 Oxford English Dictionary, Melancholy. 14 Radden, Nature of Melancholy, p. 33. 15 J.M. Quen (ed), Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatry: A Textbook for Students and Physicians (Canton: Science History Publications, 1990). 16 Frederick Goodwin, Manic-Depressive Illness Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 2. 17 Linda Austin, Nostalgia in Transition 1780-1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 54. 18 Friedrich Schiller, Resignation (1784), as quoted in Austin, Nostalgia, p. 54. 11

this as a mans awareness of his transition from deep and physiological melancholia towards a wistful recollection of the past.19 As some of the artwork we shall be exploring proceeds into the 1920s, it is also relevant to point out after Freuds 1917 essay, at least in the English-language tradition, melancholia becomes an increasingly rare disorder categoryless and less frequently described in clinical case material.20 Despite this important decisive break made between clinical depression and the state of melancholia, its history of varied meanings has led to perplexity in interpretation. It is interesting that melancholy, as a mood, has not particularly altered in meaning since the early modern period. In medical accounts, its meaning as a feeling of fear or sorrow is described as becoming of without cause or without apparent cause.21 Today, melancholy is similarly defined as two apparently unconnected formulations of an experience of sorrow without cause and loss of being.22 Therefore in the Victorian period, there was a similar discrepancy over its definition as a mood. Despite its complexity, melancholy as described as a mood became more significant. Groundless sadness and despondency, as a mood, became separated from clinical depression, which was based on grounded fear and anxiety.23 Despite this complex meaning, the word melancholy and the richness of its definition, means that we can explore subjects, like the Camden Town Groups paintings, from many interesting and varied viewpoints. 19 Austin, Nostalgia, p. 54. 20 Radden, The Nature, p. 49. See also: Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia in Collected Papers Vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, [1917] 1967. 21 Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 107. 22 Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity, p. XVI. 23 Radden, Nature of Melancholy, p. 39. 12

 It is noteworthy that nostalgia also has a history to its meaning, if not quite as complex. The term as it is known today, as a yearning for the past, is according to Bonnett not much more than a century old.24 The term first came about in 1688 by Johannes Hofer by combining the Greek nostos, meaning home, and algos, meaning pain. This longing for home was considered a medical disorder.25 Its first reference in English comes in 1770 when the botanist Joseph Banks, at sea at the time, wrote in his diary now pretty far gone in the longing for homea disease under the name of Nostalgia.26 This is quite a comparison to the more lucid and informally referenced nostalgia today. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century the term was not being used in a precise medical way, but in a larger sense to describe sentiments of the past.27 The fast pace of lifestyle that took on force in the nineteenth century led to the term nostalgia gaining a meaning that represented a shared feeling. In short, its meaning took on a new, significant, cultural sense. By the middle of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Victorians had now outlined performative and implicit memory and thus it legitimised impersonal and communal nostalgia as a cultural force.28 By the 1920s, the Oxford English Dictionary described nostalgia as a fleeting feeling rather than a medical affliction, a reflection of its changed meaning: regretful or wistful memory or recall of an earlier time. Austin tells us that within decades one 24 Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 5. 25 Carolyn Kiser Anspach (ed) and Johannes Hofer, Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, 1688, Bulletin of the History of Medicine by Johannes Hofer, 2 (1934), pp. 380-1. 26 Oxford English Dictionary, Nostalgia (1989), as quoted in Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 5. 27 Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 10. 28 Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, p. 86. 13

could talk of nostalgia frequently and that this began an endemic phenomenon.29 As a result, we often talk in terms of nostalgia today. Our world is not much different from the one that took off in the nineteenth century, and we still feel we can look into the past for safety and security. You need only see the success of historical television dramas on British television. Just as the Victorian public loved to share a nostalgic look into the past, we too appreciate those good times that have past. The Importance of Melancholy in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras It is interesting that the Camden Town Group are best known for their celebration of the modern, when their work often delves into the melancholic and nostalgic. Yet an appreciation of the modern as well as of the past had, and still has, a more complex relationship than one might realise. As Bennett states, modernity is the condition of nostalgia, it provokes and changes it.30 To adequately understand melancholy and its place at the time of the artists we are to discuss, an understanding of industrialisation and society is indispensable. The nineteenth century was a time of sweeping changes and sometimes unsettling uncertainty. The Victorian era was ushered in by the French Revolution as well as the Industrial Revolution. Although the French Revolution was remote and it is impossible to tell how much of an effect it had on the Victorian consciousness in Britain, Burrow recognises it as having a profound effect on literature in the 1830s and 1840s

29 Ibid., p. 1. 30 Ibid., p. 10. 14

especially.31 Of course, for our Post-Impressionists on the continent, the significance of these events would have had far greater impact. This occurs before the latter part of the century, which is of most relevance to our subject, but it does represent the beginning of a period in which instability and change was rampant. There was to be religious uncertainties in the 1860s, commercial anxieties in the 1870s and social tensions in the 1880s, to name but a few.32 With the Industrial Revolution came great wealth for those who could achieve it. Hippolyte Taine, the French critic and historian who visited England in the 1860s, noted his amazement in the size of wealth in the country. He also commented on the many wealthy citizens who enjoyed great luxuries and even writers who were earning for hardly writing at all. However his enthusiasm was tempered by his dislike of the social inequalities of society, the degrading poverty and miserably poor citizens. He felt that in France, although less wealthy, there was a fairer distribution of wealth.33 For the modern scholar of this period, it is an undeniable fact that poverty in Britain, especially in its cities, was an integral part of Victorian society. As a melancholy subject, poverty has great importance as a source of inspiration for the Camden Town Group. One of the best ways in which to demonstrate the extent of poverty in London at the time is to quote the findings of Charles Booth, the philanthropist and social reformer. His investigation of London in the 1890s found that

31 Laurence Lerner, The Victorians: The Context of English Literature (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1978), p. 124. 32 Carol Dyhouse, The Condition of England 1860-1900, in Lerner (ed.), The Victorians, pp. 70-71. 33 H. Taine, Notes on England, 1860-70, trans. Edward Hyams (London: Thames and Hudon, 1957), pp. 290-2. 15

30.7% of the London population were living in poverty.34 As a result of this, Keith Robbins identifies that there was persistence in a poverty culture, which became a concern to reformers into the Edwardian period.35 The Camden Town Group were stationed in Camden, North-West London. Charles Booths study describes this area as having many shops, most having lodgers above, a considerable amount of poverty exists in the centre and there being a good deal of poverty among the labourers.36 Of course one of the greatest components of the Industrial Revolution was the railway and Camden Town was part of this growing industry. In fact, by the 1870s Camden Town lay in a sea of railway lines and it did not create a pretty sight. The North Western railway and the North London line both crossed the district, belching smoke and coal dust day and night.37 Camden Town was quite the contrast to Regents park, so much so that Hugh Prince feels the need to describe it as such: Nowhere in Londonwas the contrast between two sides of a railway track more sharply drawn.38 It is no surprise that such an environment was apt for an artist to express melancholy. It also provided a challenging environment for the Camden Town Group to express some of the beauty that could be found in modernity, as well as showing its grim reality.

34 Keith Robbins, The British Isles 1901-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 207-8. 35 Ibid., p. 213. 36 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London: Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 180. 37 Jack Whitehead, The Growth of Camden Town AD 1800-2000 (London: J. Whitehead, 1999), p. 43. 38 David Owen, The Government of Victorian London 1855-1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1982), p. 261. 16

 The significance of the term nostalgia in the Victorian and Edwardian period was related to the fast changing landscape, such as the impact of the railways. Although Austin describes the nostalgia phenomenon as taking shape after the 1920s, it rather ignores the significance of a harking to the past that was so evident in Victorian and Edwardian culture. Perhaps it is right to ascribe the phenomenon of its modern meaning as beginning in the period after the 1920s. However, we can better understand the world in which the Camden Town Group lived by applying this modern meaning to their work. Perhaps the word nostalgia didnt quite have the same broad significance, but its meaning as we know it was certainly dominant in their culture. Urbanisation was the most spectacular feature of nineteenth century social change.39 The vast metropolis of London, and the industrial strains felt elsewhere in the country, left many feeling melancholic. A significant reaction to this was the embodiment of new ideas of how to combine country and town. One way in which this was done was through the creation of parks and private gardens and tree-lined roads that inserted zones of quiet and tranquillity which formerly had been rarities.40 But on a larger scale there was a bigger issue, which was that of urban sprawl. For contemporary social and architectural critics of the time were fascinated and appalled by the mindless, sweeping nature of the sprawldevouring land, destroying the countryside.41 Some felt melancholic about the loss of close-knit communities which existed in a by- gone era. It was this nostalgia for a way of remembered as purer, simpler and closer to

39 Dyhouse, The Condition of England, p. 80. 40 Robert John Morris, Richard Rodger, The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History 1820-1914 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 21. 41 Ibid., p. 150. 17

nature that created and underpinned semi-rural suburban developments.42 The idea of the Garden City was advocated by Ebenezer Howard in Tomorrow: A Peaceful path to Real Reform (1898). The Garden City was intended to be a planned self-contained community surrounded by parks, with self contained housing, agriculture and industry. This led to the creation of Letchworth Garden City in 1903; the first of its kind. A few of the Camden Town Group actually visited Letchworth and painted there as a respite from London. Letchworth perfectly represented the past and present by attempting to provide the best of both worlds. The Camden Town Group, with their flare for appreciating the melancholic and nostalgic, found a fitting subject in Letchworth, as we shall see. Childhood nostalgia was an understandable subject in art of this period, for children were the major cause-and therefore victims- of poverty.43 Seebohm Rowntree, a social reformer inspired by Booths survey of London, identified himself that a family of four or more as the cause of over a fifth of poverty in 1899.44 In London alone, 60,000 children were insufficiently nourished to benefit from schooling.45 With the majority of working class children born into poverty, it was understandable that society developed a nostalgic culture of looking back to a time when children were more likely to be brought up in a country setting. 42 Paul J. Cloke, Terry Marsden, Patrick H. Mooney, Handbook of Rural Studies (London: SAGE, 2006), p. 141. 43 Robbins, The British Isles, p. 211. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 214. 18

Identifying Personal and Cultural Melancholy The complexity of the history and meaning of melancholy can make it difficult to define the difference between personal and cultural melancholy. It has been noted however, that in the arts of the eighteenth century, melancholy as a wistful and pleasurable feeling was already being defined and expressed. This can be taken as a personal experience, for example, the loss of a loved one who you may remember fondly. However, the culture of melancholy was one that was being felt and expressed by a society as a whole, in all of its complexities. Dyhouse points out that it was during this period, around 1900, that many individuals were passing through a personal crisis engendered by the loss of religious faith.46 This personal sense of melancholy often transcended to people finding solace in a social duty to help those in need. Trying to find optimism within personal despair was recognised in literature. In the novel Robert Elsmere, written in 1888 by Mrs Humphrey Ward, this theme is dramatised through her title characters journey from personal religious crisis towards finding redemption in helping the poor.47 This sort of transition highlights the difficulties in dividing shared and personal melancholy, for such a personal experience can be shared and appreciated by a society. It is perhaps in mental illness and clinical depression that we can appreciate a true experience of personal melancholy, both then and today. This is what seemingly divides the Camden Town Group most definitively with the Post-Impressionists. Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin all suffered from clinical melancholia at one stage at their 46 Dyhouse, The Condition of England, p. 75. 47 Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Robert Elsmere (London: Macmillan and co, 1888). 19

lives, at least. Their ability to transcend this personal darkness into their work has been appreciated widely. It could be said that, like those individuals finding themselves in religious turmoil, these men were finding optimism in a form of artistic expression. Personal melancholy within the Camden Town Group was not so perceptibly evident within their work. Instead, it is more outwardly expressive of the cultural variety, as we shall see. It can be said that the most lasting legacy we have of Victorian cultural melancholy, is its expression throughout literature. Charles Dickens, no doubt one of the most successful novelists of the age, is well known for the gritty realism he portrayed in his novels. In fact, he himself lived in Camden Town as a boy as well as his character of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.48 Furthermore, he describes Camden Town in The posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: whatever it may be now, was in those days a desolate place enough, surrounded by little else than fields and ditches.49 Melancholy within British culture becomes particularly interesting in the latter stages of the Victorian age. It was an era in which despair and optimism were often closely allied.50 Donald Read has highlighted the importance of optimism and pessimism through newspaper extracts from The Times. On the 1st January 1901, before Queen Victorias death, the newspaper writes optimistically about Britains future: we may look forward with good hope to the storms and conflicts that may await us. In contrast, an article written but twenty-two days later in the same newspaper and after the Queens death, pessimism is creeping in: we are finding ourselves somewhat less 48 Paul Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 13. 49 Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Volume 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858), p. 305. 50 Dyhouse, The Condition of England, p. 75.

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secure of our position. By 1914, The Times reports nowhere is there greater proneness to self-deprecation than in this country.51 At the turn of the century the British consciousness in regards to the countrys place in the world had a complex relationship between optimism and a rather more melancholy outlook. As shall be discussed, it is this fine line between these two seemingly contradictory feelings that the Camden Town Group trod so successfully. By finding magnificence in melancholy they expressed this extremely complex culture of optimism and pessimism. Their Post-Impressionist counterparts on the continent can also be read as treading this fine line, yet from their own personal and cultural perspective. In France, one of the best lasting legacies of Romantic poetry comes from Charles Baudelaire. His life was one of personal despair, a reflection of his Bohemian Paris lifestyle. He suffered from illness and a constant despondent mood, which becomes evident in his poems.52 Romantic poetry of this time typically aligned sadness with beauty and it is of this vein that Baudelaire wrote his poetry. In Autumn Song he writes, Soon will we plunge into the cold darknessunder the heavy and ceaseless blows of the battering rain.53 Mirroring the English poet John Keats, Baudelaire used a conjunction of sadness with pleasure.54 He himself expressed in his journal that beautyit is something of ardour and sadnessof voluptuousness and sadness- which

51 The Times (1 January 1901), The Times (23 January 1901), The Times (I January 1914), in Donald Read, Documents from Edwardian England 1901-1915 (London: Harrap, 1973). 52 Radden, The Nature, p. 231. 53 Charles Baudelaire, Autumn Song from Flowers of Evil (1857), in Radden, The Nature, p. 232. 54 Radden, The Nature, p. 232. 21

conveys an idea of melancholy.55 Baudelaires personal experience with sadness and pleasure was also being expressed culturally in literature and art. It was an experience that many could identify with. Personal melancholy was being infused into the collective experience. The Camden Town Group tapped into the cultural vogue for combining two seemingly opposing themes: that of sadness and beauty. Before the late nineteenth century, it could be said that nostalgia only had its place as a sub-definition of the medical and personal affliction of melancholy. By the time the Camden Town Group were living and working, it had dropped this medical definition and become more integral in cultural melancholy. This isnt to say that nostalgia was not also a personal experience and that it wasnt expressed as such. Bonnett describes nostalgia as beginning to lead a double life in its place at the heart of both cultural and personal experience.56 As shall be explored, an artists personal expression of nostalgia could have both personal and cultural meaning. Victorian and Edwardian society expressed cultural nostalgia within the arts, most notably perhaps in literature. The Industrial Revolution rapidly and decisively led to a great evolution in society and culture, which was not necessarily appreciated by everyone. People shared a sense of social dislocation and memories of a greater past, which transpired into their culture. This cultural nostalgia is very prominent in some of the Camden Town artists work. Nevertheless, nostalgia is a ubiquitous facet of personal life and sometimes this has transpired within these artists work.

55 Charles Baudelaire and A. Van Bever (ed.), Journaux Intimes (Paris: Cres, [1887] 1999), p. 84. 56 Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 5. 22

 The Victorian culture for looking back into the past was expressed by a man of his time, William Morris, when he expressed the Victorians as having a tendency to retrospection.57 We can see in this the nineteenth century architecture that surrounds us today. Their resurrection of Gothic medieval style architecture, expressed their desire to hark back into the English past. This tendency to promote the historical within Victorian culture has been touched upon by J.W.Burrow. He acknowledges that we can see such nostalgic culture within the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites who provided earnest escapism. Nevertheless, importantly he writes of defining between the publics apparently insatiable appetite for conversation pieces in historical costume and others earnestly held and vehemently profound social, moral and aesthetic preferences.58 A whimsical taste for the past could simply be someone following fashionable culture, where as for some a nostalgic look to the past could be felt on a more personal, deep level. One of the ways in which nostalgia was most strongly felt within Victorian and Edwardian culture, was through an appreciation of the countryside. Within an industrial world, society still sought comfort in the countrys agricultural past. Thus even as Britain celebrated its orderly Victorian culture and its success as the workshop of the world, the countryside was celebrated as the very heart of England.59 These values had roots within the eighteenth century period of Romanticism. The countryside ideal had been a reaction to parliamentary enclosure, which rationalised the English

57 William Morris as quoted in J.W. Burrow, The Sense of the Past, in Lerner (ed.), The Victorians, p. 120. 58 Burrow, The Sense of the Past, p. 121. 59 James Ernest Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), p. 50. 23

landscape.60 The Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, wrote of the natural beauty and life that the countryside possesses: something infused with the very spirit of creation itself.61 Consequently, a culture of country nostalgia transcends into the nineteenth century. It is this past England that became so important to a Victorian culture which thrived on nostalgia. In the London metropolis there was a shared demand for some sort of escape, which in one way, was found in literature. If Dickens provided grim melancholic reality, writers such as Mary Mitford provided a rural escape. In the 1820s and 30s, Mitford wrote a series called Our Village. The proof of such nostalgic culture is read in the fact that the circulation of the magazine, which carried her essays, increased eightfold.62 It was London readerswho wanted to read her sketches of life in a classic English village; the sort of village that industrialisation and urbanisation were destroying.63 The popularity of such contradictory subjects as Dickens and Mitford, represent the complexity of Victorian society. The extensive poverty that plagued areas of London and the children who lived within it, led to a form of nostalgic culture that revolved around childhood. As well as seeking a historical nostalgia for a time well before their own, some Victorians sought reassurance in their own childhood memories. This form of personal memory transpired into literature and the arts and thus became a cultural phenomenon. Ann C.Colley has studied this particular form of Victorian culture and recognised its importance. This more immediate nostalgia can be found in the narratives of Elizabeth 60 Ibid., p. 49. 61 Ibid. 62 Herbert Tucker, A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 384. 63 Ibid. 24

Gaskell or Walter Horatio Paters The Child in the House, or even in a series of engravings by J. M. W. Turner.64 She argues, that these artists all suffer from a desire for reunion, for some point of correspondence between their present and their past.65 Such artists are part of a culture that is seeking a resolution to the melancholy they experience in their lives. It is perhaps ironic, that they find this in recollecting the past, which in itself can be a rather melancholic experience. Nevertheless, childhood and what it represented, namely an ideological life without worry or pressure, provided the Victorians with a creative outlet. The complexity of nostalgia and its double life as a personal and cultural experience have certainly transpired into the twenty first century. As a result, we can relate to popularity of nostalgia in both its personal and cultural sense, furthermore helping us understand the Camden Town Groups work and their complex relationship with the modern and traditional world. Melancholy in History of Art The complexity of melancholia and its meaning over the ages, has meant that it is a constant theme and inspiration for man through to the present day. Madness and melancholy have always disturbedbut they also exercise a singular fascination on the imagination of countless generations of artists, writers and thinkers.66 The many forms of melancholy described, created an endless supply of possible forms in which melancholy can be explored and expressed using the arts. It is intriguing that where 64 Ann Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), p. 2. 65 Ibid., p. 3. 66 Peter E. Pormann (ed.), Rufus of Ephesus, On Melancholy (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), p. 3. 25

madness in history has often been misunderstood and those suffering from it shunned, it could also be appreciated as a characteristic of genius. So is the complexity of melancholy. Before the Post-Impressionists and the Camden Town Group put paint to canvas, melancholy within art had a varied history. Looking back to the medieval ages, we only need look to medieval illustrations to have a visualised representation of how melancholia was understood and expressed at the time. Jennifer Raden has pointed to Melancholicus (1490) from the Augsburg Calendar, showing a man of a gloomy expression: a victim of melancholic disorder.67 During the German Renaissance, the artist Lucas Cranach the Elder painted Melancholy, An Allegory in 1532 [Fig. 2]. This work also gives us a visual idea of how melancholy was understood according to Raden. Indeed the painting shows us rather contradictory elements of a contented looking female figure in the foreground, whilst an unsettling scene of naked figures riding animals occurs in the background. As a result, this painting presents the array of associations made so evident in writing about melancholy.68 67 Melancholicus, 1490. Oil. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. See also, Radden, The Nature, p. 5. 68 Radden, The Nature, p. 6. 26

Figure 2. Lucas Cranach, Melancholy, An Allegory, 1532. Oil on panel (113 x 72cm). Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

Figure 3. C.D. Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1809-1810. Oil on canvas (110 x 171.5 cm).Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. 27

 We have noted how in the eighteenth century the rise of Romanticism put the idea of cultural nostalgia on the literary map. Yet it is also the idea of Romantic melancholy that gathers force towards the end of the eighteenth century, where writing was similarly filled with the exaggerated feelings of grief and solitude, longing and sadness. The painter C.D. Friedrich created The Monk by the Sea (1809-1810) [Fig. 3], which evokes his ability to show this range of responses and moods in dark, haunting landscapes.69 This charts an important development of melancholy in art; a move from melancholy as expressed as a mental ailment of man, to a subjective feeling which can be applied to nature. It has already been mentioned that the Victorians enjoyed looking to the past and reviving old architectural and artistic styles. This tendency for revivalism, although considered a Victorian phenomenon, was not a new one. In terms of architectural history, looking back on history and reviving styles has touched almost all European architecture from the Renaissance to the present century.70 It is rather ironic, that in a period known for its technological advances, culturally in Britain there was an artistic yearning for the past. This is artistic evidence proving Bennetts statement, that modernity provokes and changes nostalgia, is a very prudent one. Joseph F Lamb has written of the Late Victorian art scene in London, with particular reference to the artists communities which thrived there. During the 1860s to the late 1880s, artists found great adulation from the public. These artists were generally to be found happily within the suburban areas of Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead or St. Johns Wood. But by the 1890s the London art scene was moving away from these 69 Ibid., p. 30. 70 Burrow, The Sense of the Past, p. 121. 28

areas as they became too expensive for young artists. Besides, these artists preferred to find new inspiration elsewhere in London, especially in areas like Camden Town with its gritty reality.71 This is where the Camden Town Group found their place within the history of art. It is where they were to find their inspiration to appreciate all aspects of the melancholy world, as well as send them further afield, to capture the lost world of agricultural England.

71 Joseph F. Lamb, Symbols of Success in Suburbia: The Establishment of Artists Communities in Late Victorian London, in Debra N. Mancoff and D.J. Trele (eds), Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and its Contexts (New York: Garland Publications, 1996), p. 72. 29

 CHAPTER TWO
Who Were the Camden Town Group? The Camden Town Group was officially active between 1911 and 1913, a relatively small time period. Subsequently, although this dissertation will refer to the Camden Town Group, not all of their paintings in this discussion will date from this precise time period. The group was part of a development which actually preceded 1911 and continued beyond it. To grasp this, a brief history of the group and its participants is necessary. Today, the most remembered member of the Camden Town Group is undoubtedly Walter Sickert. In 1905 the artist returned to London after having spent the preceding years in Dieppe and Venice. At forty-five years of age, he had already experienced Impressionism and been involved in a circle of artists that included Whistler and Degas.72 It was on this trip abroad that he had met the future Camden Town president, Spencer Frederick Gore.73 It was young artists such as Gore, who Sickert wanted to steer and support with his mature outlook. On his return, he rented two studios in the neighbourhood around Fitzroy Street and settled down at 6 Mornington Crescent in Camden Town. It is around the two studios that the Fitzroy Street Group was born, a precursor to the Camden Town Group. He received regular visitors including both Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman. They began to exhibit their work together at 19 Fitzroy Street, where other artists such as Lucien 72 Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century: Volume (London: Ashgate Publishing, 1965), p. 149. 73 Wendy Baron, Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), p. 19. 30

Pissarro, Robert Bevan, Walter Bayes and Charles Ginner agreed to join.74 Other visitors included William Ratcliffe, Augustus John and J. D. Innes. The Camden Town Group itself was born in 1911, when Sickert and his circle wanted to form an association with a common cause and partly as a reaction against the New English Art Club. This association had, according to the Camden Town Group members, been creeping towards conservatism in the wake of Roger Frys Manet and the Post- Impressionists exhibition of 1910-11.75 Membership was limited to sixteen artists, most members transferring from the Fitzroy Street Group. Gilman and Sickert were opposed to the inclusion of women in the group, and only Wyndham Lewis and Maxwell Lightfoot were elected from the outside.76 Inspiration and Technique If the Camden Town Group found a common ground within subject matter, the techniques they adopted were more lucid. Their minds were opened, not only to Gauguin and Czanne, but also to Van Gogh and the Neo-Impressionists. The presence of Lucien Pissarro meant they were in supply of a good deal of authentic information.77 We have mentioned the 1910 exhibition by Roger Fry twice already, this is due to the importance it had in bringing the techniques of the Post-Impressionists to the group. However, for some, they had already encountered their work. The palette the group used drew on the examples of their French Post-Impressionist counterparts. 74 Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (Yale: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 69 75 Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, p. 150. 76 Bernadette Nelson, The Camden Town Group (Oxford: Oxonian Rewley, 1991), p. 4. 77 Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, p. 150. 31

 Gores technique was little influenced by his mentor Sickert. Sickert was occupied by the contrasts of colour and texture, typically within the composition of figures and their psychological relationship.78 His palette was typically restricted to the use of violet/green colour mixed with bone black that Whistler introduced.79 Gore, on the other hand, found his great admiration in Cezanne, claiming that it is the sincerity with which he pursues his object that gives his work that wonderful gravity.80 Bevan, like Sickert and Gore, had also travelled abroad, seeing Van Gogh and Gauguins work whilst living in Pont Aven and Paris. His unhabited approach to colour captured the members of, the then, Fitzroy Street Group.81 By 1912, Gore, Ginner and Bevan were becoming adventurous in colour and design.82 We will find that Bevan was particularly inspired by Gauguin, as was Gore. Gilman found his inspiration particularly in the work of Van Gogh. A copy of Van Goghs letters were always on his table and reproductions of his paintings were pinned all over his walls.83 It was Ginner who introduced Gilman to great French painters by taking him to exhibitions in Paris. Van Gogh touched him most however, and he sought to emulate him in using built up strips of vivid colour.84 Gilman in turn, influenced Ratcliffe after they met in Letchworth in 1908, turning to Gilmans sources of inspiration for himself. Technique would create division; Sickert disliked the use of thick impasto, as did a minor player of the group, Walter Bayes. On the other hand, Ginner and Gilman were 78 Nelson, The Camden Town Group, p. 3. 79 Grace Brockington, Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the fin de sicle (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 46. 80 Haftmann, Painting, p. 122. 81 Nelson, The Camden Town Group, p. 3. 82 Ibid., p. 4. 83 Maureen Connett, Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group (Devon: David and Charles, 1992), p. 48. 84 Ibid., p. 49. 32

advocates of the technique. It is arguable that it was their use of bold, flat areas of colour which became associated also with Bevan and Gore, that became most characteristic of the group.85 As we analyse the paintings in more detail within the next chapter, the nature of these differences will become clearer, as well as a shared appreciation of the wide variety of Post-Impressionist techniques they used. The Camden Town Group Subject Sickerts return to London in 1905 was driven by a desire to paint a new subject. He had grown tired of working on the architecture of Dieppe. Instead he longed to study the drab and sleazy suburbs of London.86 It is perhaps his interiors which are so well known, for he had been painting intimate interiors since 1903.87 The Camden Town Murder, painted in 1908, is perhaps one of his best-known works, based on the crimes of Jack the Ripper [Fig. 4]. His work tended to focus on the grim interiors of Camden Town and the equally grim suburban life that existed in the area. As a result, his subjects will not be crucial to this dissertation, but as Wendy Baron concludes, in all points of the story, Sickert is omnipresent.88 All of the Camden Town Group strove for realism. At the heart of their creation was their desire to paint the constant movement of London . Against a backdrop of developing international tensions, their direct and often unflinching portrayal of urban

85 Ian Chilvers, The Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 123. 86 Baron, Perfect Moderns, p. 19. 87 Ibid., p. 23. 88 Baron, Perfect Moderns, p. 15. 33

life seemed to assume a kind of gravitas.89 Their first exhibition held in June 1911 and their second later that year, reflected this subject matter. The area of Camden Town was considered the perfect area to do this, Sickert having lived in the borough for several years. Apart from finding their desire to paint realism within the city landscape, they also found inspiration in portraits and still-lifes. At the third and last exhibition in December 1912, there was a dramatic change of subject to that of the rural landscape.90 It is at this point where our discussion will be of most value. The typical interiors which had dominated before, were now being dominated by a theme that was not originally part of the groups chosen subject. Gore had been painting landscapes before the Camden Town Group was established. Some tentative landscapes he painted in Normandy in 1904, still survive.91 After an interlude of painting the city of London when under the influence of Sickert, trips in the country, such as at Applehayes with Ginner and Bevan, provides us with an alternative subject. 89 Stephen Deuchar, Directors Foreword, in Robert Upstone (ed.), Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 6. 90 Nelson, The Camden Town Group, p. 4. 91 Baron, Perfect Moderns, p. 21. 34

Figure 4. Walter Sickert, The Camden Town Murder (What Shall we do for Rent?), c. 1908. Oil on canvas, (25.6 x 35.6 cm) Yale Centre for British Art.

35

Disagreement and Division In some of the darkest subjects, the members of the Camden Town Group could find beauty and modernity. However, the cracks in their relationships and their diverse views on technique and subject, were problems not so easy to cover. Like Gauguin and Van Gogh before them, artistic differences had a negative effect on their artistic relationships. Even those artists who believed in the groups common goal, found irreconcilable differences divided them. Whilst Sickert had an appreciation for Gores use of Cezannes technique, he himself had a low opinion of Cezanne. Additionally, his relationship with Ginner and Gilman was soured by their opposing ideas. He denied that either of them had inherited any of Cezannes technique. 92 Since their meeting in 1904, Gore and Sickert had a close relationship, where Sickert tended to face disagreements with other members. Gilman and Sickert, in particular, had clashing personalities. They became careless of each others feelings, disagreeing over how the group should be run.93 Disagreements flowed into the post Camden Town Group period. Sickert openly attacked Ginner and Gore in June 1914, claiming that it is a trivial thing to spend a life-time in an effort after intrinsic brightness of paint.94 Lucien Pissarro grew disillusioned with the group, disliking Wyndam Lewiss vorticist style; he did not see why they should put up with such rubbish.95 These internal differences would lead to the groups demise. Members of the group were virtually 92 Haftmann, Painting, p. 234. 93 Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 48. 94 Baron, Perfect Moderns, p. 23. 95 Nelson, The Camden Town Group, p. 4. 36

divided from the start into an inner enthusiastic hierarchy and an outer ring of satellites whose loyalty to it was half hearted.96. All that held them together was a resentment of the established art world and it was a foregone conclusion that the life of the Camden Town Group would be short.97 Personal Melancholy and the End of the Camden Town Group Just as depression and turmoil were present at the ends of the lives of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, death was also present in the final days of the Camden Town Group. Lightfoot tragically committed suicide in 1911 after his parents disapproved of his fianc.98 Gore died prematurely from pneumonia on 25th March 1914, which was felt deeply by his friends and fellow artistic friends. Gilman wrote to the wife of Pissarro, It is a terrible loss to me made more terrible by his having such a wonderful character.99 Gilman himself suffered a troubled personal life. His marriage had disintegrated by 1909, when his wife took their children to her native America. He was left devastated by the loss of his children.100 He died in 1919 and it was a devastating blow to his artist friend Ratcliffe. He continued to paint however, but with little success, and being very

96 The Arts Council of Great Britain, An Exhibition of Paintings: The Camden Town Group (Great Britain: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1953), p. 2. 97 Ibid. 98 Tate Online, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot: A Biography http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1510&pag e=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio (13 December 2011). 99 Letter from Harold Gilman to Mrs Pissarro (25 March 1914), Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 44. 100 Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 47. 37

poor as a result plagued his life.101 Drummond also lacked success and suffered from blindness in the last few years of his life. He died in 1945, obscure and forgotten, save for a few friends and fellow artists.102 By this time, the Camden Town Group had already been dissolved. In October 1913, the London Group was formed by combining the Camden Town Group and Fitzroy Street Group. After Gores death, Gilman was elected president and membership increased to thirty-two, as well as permitting women. Sickert and Pissarro resigned before the first exhibition was held in March 1914.103. Ginner and Gilman went on to work together closely, calling themselves Neo-Realists.104 Although they were not technically referred to as the Camden Town Group by this point, their work will still be important as a study. Consequently, the following chapter will make no attempt to restrict the paintings to the 1911-13 period. As I hope this chapter has shown, the artists who we associate with the group produced work which was created before and after this specific time period, and which is still relevant to this discussion. 101 Ibid., p. 89. 102 Ibid., p. 77. 103 Nelson, The Camden Town Group, p. 5. 104 Ibid. 38

CHAPTER THREE

i) An Analysis of Melancholy in the Cityscape

Figure 5. William Whitehead Ratcliffe, Regents Canal at Hammersmith, c. 1910-20. Oil on canvas (52 x 60 cm) Letchworth Museum and Art Gallery.

Figure 6. Vincent Van Gogh, View of the Roofs of Paris, 1886. Oil on canvas (54 x 75.5 cm) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

39

 There is no better way to discuss the cityscape in our period than to analyse London and Paris; two burgeoning cities pulsing under the pressure of Victorian and Edwardian life. I have specifically chosen Vincent Van Goghs View of the Roofs of Paris [Fig. 6} and William Ratcliffes Regents Canal at Hammersmith [Fig. 5], for they express so eloquently the themes discussed in the first chapter. Unfortunately, writing on these two paintings has been slim, for art historians have largely overlooked them. On the other hand, we can fortunately explore a fresh perspective on two great artists and the connection they shared. Van Gogh had left Holland for Paris in 1886 and was to spend two years there, where he would experience Impressionist painting but become ambivalent about their subject matter which focused on modern Paris.105 Van Gogh wanted to celebrate the poetry of old Paris, yet the razing of whole medieval neighbourhoods left him feeling that the city now dwarfed the individual.106 William Ratcliffe, on the other hand, was an artist who revelled in exploring the modern. In Hammersmith, he found the peculiar juxtaposition of affluence and poverty, choosing to portray the less attractive residential area and transform it through art. At first glance, View of the Roofs of Paris shows the viewer it is a city, yet it isnt clear precisely which city it is. Our senses are filled with the variation of the swirling brushstrokes that dominate the sky, which are contrasting against the smaller vertical lines that dominate the buildings in the foreground. The shapes of the buildings are therefore more dense than the free forming strokes of the clouded sky. Immediately, a tumultuous mood has been created. Line and shape become more fully formed for 105 Ann Galbally, A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent Van Gogh and John Peter Russell (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), p 114. 106 Ibid. 40

Ratcliffe in Regents Canal. Form is created with smaller, softer brushstrokes, to express social melancholy in a sedate state. Yet both artists have effectively expressed the vast conurbation of houses by using an angle that overlaps the features in the landscape. Van Gogh uses repetition of simplified shapes to represent the buildings which overlay one another. Space becomes restricted where the sky is open. Ratcliffe also shows repeated buildings extending into the distance. Crowded housing was a visual landmark of poor areas in urban centres, which viewers then and now can equally identify. Such iconography was shared within literature throughout the Victorian period, not only by Dickens, but also that other great novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His great creation Sherlock Holmes observed so dense a swarm of humanity.107 The tendency in which society in Britain had in expressing the theme of melancholia within artistic resources, made Ratcliffes work culturally relevant. Van Gogh had allowed this image to express the burgeoning expansion of Paris, as well as to express his tendency to project his own personal melancholy. By 1900, Paris was dealing with the same problems London was experiencing. Stoval writes that there was a shortage of low-cost housing causing the resultant overcrowding of the working class in Paris.108 Within View of the Roofs in Paris, the scale of the subject is large, presenting a vast view of Paris for the viewer to engage in. Buildings move from large in the foreground to smaller and less well formed in the background. The sky is given over half of the canvas space, preventing the landscape from dominating. The city represents the 107 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Harper & Bros, 1892), p. 154. 108 Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 24. 41

significance of the nineteenth century; it is a symbol of industrialisation. The viewer is made to feel small in relation to it, a mere observer of the social melancholy which falls upon the masses. Ratcliffe doesnt use large scale to make us feel dwarfed, but instead places us inside the residential area, making us feel confined. He uses the concept of a small space, a clearly squalid and poor area of London, to express the cultural importance of poverty. Ratcliffe expresses textural variation by painting in the brick and tiles on the left building, as well as fine detail on the ropes and wood panelling of the boat. For all the darkness that is implied by the crowded housing, he is expressing variation and detail within a socially melancholy landscape, which has been informed by its claustrophobic structure. Yet texture becomes obsolete further back in the pictorial space, where he suggests the vast housing. The figure on the left is barely noticeable and the figure on the boat a mere shadow: a visual reminder of the poor. These characters become an expression of the poverty culture that Keith Robbins has identified.109 Ratcliffes inclusion of these individuals reveals an interest in projecting social melancholy. Van Gogh leaves such textural detail out of the picture altogether. This is a landscape where the city has dwarfed the individual and there is no beautiful detail to be found here. Both artists are expressing societies melancholic experience of the city, yet Ratcliffe can find individuality in an oppressive place, where Van Gogh sees the cityscape as a mass melancholic experience reliant on the cityscape to symbolise this. In View Of the Roofs of Paris, the clouds have been painted impasto to define the swirling action of his brushstroke and characterize sky from landscape. The soft shaping of the clouds has then been reflected in the soft rounded brushstrokes that form the 109 Robbins, The British Isles, p. 213. 42

trees. The foliage then becomes juxtaposed with the solid square, rectangular and triangular shapes that form the buildings. Ratcliffe uses a flatter and softer brushstroke for the whole of the painting, which ensures that the tree becomes part of the cityscape rather than competing with it. Both paintings are alluding to the power and beauty of nature, how it is competing with urban life. In View of the Roofs of Paris, the trees are barely noticeable against the rooftops. Beauty is trapped in mass sprawl. In Ratcliffes painting, the tree also appears trapped within urban life, yet the light upward strokes that form the branches and leaves of the tree, appear hopeful as they stretch towards the sky. Nature often becomes a symbol in which to express personal and cultural melancholy within the arts. It is particularly significant in the 1800s however. For example, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront, published in 1847, is famous for its use of pathetic fallacy.110 Nature however, was also a simple enduring symbol of the countryside. In London, conscientious efforts were made to bring the country into the city to appease the personal and social melancholy the city suffered. Ratcliffe displays both the melancholic structure of life in Hammersmith and also the beauty society found in nature, side by side. Van Gogh, by contrast, uses nature as a struggling symbol of individuality. Ratcliffe creates tone through his bright and vibrant palette. The buildings are informed by deep intense yellows, oranges, pinks, reds, blues, greens and purples. Dark blues on the roofs of the background buildings create depth and shadow, where the translucent use of a pastel palette for the canal create lightness. The deep contrasts do not so much create a buoyant mood as evoke a fantastic combination of moods. Ratcliffe uses colour to evoke personal appreciation rather than illuminate any cultural 110 Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (New York: Harper & Bros, 1858). 43

significance. A dark corner of London is bathed in the light of sunset: it is beautiful but clearly shouldnt be. For Van Gogh, darkness and light is formed primarily from his use of two prominently different colour palettes, darker in tone than Ratcliffe. The buildings and foliage in the foreground are defined by warm browns, greens and oranges, forming brick, foliage and chimneys. The buildings in the background are informed by dark to light greys, blues, beige, white and a hint of pink. This opposing colour palette renders form and shape simplified, where as the contrast of colour in the foreground ensures form is dominant. The greys and blues that dominate the space create a haze of smoke, which alludes to the industrial nature of industrial cities. Ratcliffe instead uses Regents canal to express the extension of industry into the city. The canal boat becomes an immediate icon of industry in London. However, here it appears subdued: an accepted part of the landscape. Ratcliffe is tapping into the complexity of Victorian culture that projected optimism in industry as well as the social and cultural melancholy which industry provoked. In View of the Roofs of Paris, the buildings in the background seem to fold into the skyline by echoing the same blue- grey colour palette. It appears as if smoke and cloud is moving to consume the foreground buildings informed in a warmer palette. We are reminded of the Parisian poet Baudelaire, quoted previously in chapter one: Soon we will plunge into the cold darknessunder the heavy and ceaseless blows of the battering rain.111 By 1910, London had for many years been transformed into an industrial centre. Ratcliffe reflects this acceptance of shared melancholy and the beauty to be found within it. For Baudelaire and Van Gogh however, they found themselves in a city still undergoing change. His work reflects the melancholy felt socially and personally about Pariss 111 Baudelaire, Autumn Song (1857). 44

transformation. When Van Gogh arrived in Paris, the city was busy preparing for the International Exposition of 1889, as well as still undergoing a programme of modernisation under Baron Haussmann. Controversy over the building of the Eiffel Tower, reflected the feelings of unhappiness people felt over modernisation.112 As a result, both Van Gogh and Ratcliffe are expressing the thoughts of contemporary social and architectural critics of the time. People were as equally fascinated as they were appalled by urban sprawl.113 Great movement has been implied by the swirls of large brushstrokes that Van Gogh uses to form clouds. The long thin lines repeatedly forming chimneys on the rooftops create a staccato rhythmic quality, which contrasts with the large rounded brushstrokes of the sky, creating a heavier and confused rhythm. As a result, the buildings represent the fast, quick pace of the city. The darkness of form creates density, but the chimneys become a symbol of industrialisation. Van Gogh is showing there is consistent expansion in this city, but the dark palette and overlapping form are a reminder of the melancholic destruction of old Paris. Movement is not so much portrayed in Ratcliffes painting, but rather it is implied as happening when we, the viewer, cannot see. Ratcliffe stops us from feeling movement so that we are prevented from seeing the obvious, in that social melancholy was felt prominently in a poor area and to instead see beauty within it. The brushstrokes that form the water are not large and swirling like the brushstrokes that form van Goghs sky, but instead appear in small strokes. Dark outlines around forms, such as the boat and brick wall, prevent forms

112 Enrica Crispino, Van Gogh (Minneapolis, MN: Oliver Press, 2008), p. 24. 113 See Chapter 1, pg 6 Reference when pages are numbered 45

from moving. The boat and the curved form of the canal only imply movement. We are simply left to observe social melancholy and beauty coinciding in the golden light. In 1886, Van Gogh had not yet discovered his brilliance with the colour palette, how it could transform something dark into something luminous. Yet his use of form and brushstroke were uniquely his and all encompassing in View of the Roofs of Paris. Here he expresses both his personal disillusionment with Paris and combines it with the social melancholy of life felt in Paris. Ratcliffe also shared both personal and social experience within Regents Canal at Hammersmith. Painted during the Camden Town Group decade, the 1910s, the lasting influence of Van Goghs later, brighter palette is clear in this painting. What matters most however, is how both shared an appreciation of all forms melancholy within the cityscape. Ratcliffe was able to reconcile his personal appreciation of modern life with socially accepted melancholic life experienced in London. Subject, form, shape and line create the melancholic scene. Colour however, allowed melancholy to shine. He perfectly reflected the complexity of Victorian society, which had contradicted itself by being attracted to the social melancholy of the cities as well as the beauty of the country. Both artists equally expressed, not only their own feeling but also societies, even if these opinions were somewhat different.

46

ii) An Analysis of Melancholy in the Modern Country Landscape

Figure 7. Spencer Gore, The Beanfield, Letchworth, 1912. Oil on canvas (30.5 x 40.6cm) Tate Collections.

Figure 8. Paul Cezanne, The Railway Cutting, 1870. Oil on canvas (80 x 129 cm) Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.

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 Spencer Gore had a preoccupation with the work of Paul Czanne, such that he wrote of his admiration in his regular column for Art News: It is the intense sincerity with which he pursues his object which gives to his painting that wonderful gravity.114 Both Gore and Cezanne found that gravity and means of expression in the controversial subject of industrialisation within the country landscape. Compared to the work of his colleague Ratcliffe, Gores work has been given considerable more attention within the history of art. Cezanne, like Van Gogh, is written about extensively but the painting that shall be discussed here, The Railway Cutting [Fig. 8], is not so well analysed as that of his later work. Gores 1912 landscape, The Beanfield, Letchworth [Fig. 7], provides an intriguing comparison to Cezannes impression of modernism in the country. Cezanne often voiced his attitude to changes which technological progress had on the landscape. The town of Aix has been ruined by the Chief Engineer of Roads. You will have to hurry if you want to see anything, he wrote to Emile Bernard.115 At the time of painting The Railway Cutting, he was living in LEstaque as a refuge from Paris due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. Gore was also seeking a sort of refuge, at the garden city of Letchworth. Here, culture was attempting to combine modernity with rural life. Gore sought to find a resolution between the two, as Ratcliffe had in the city, whereas Cezanne could only see modernity destroying nature. The depiction of Gores landscape in The Beanfield immediately contradicts the traditional interpretation of the naturalist landscape. Lines are not used to utilise 114 Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 37. 115 Ulrike Malorny, Paul Cezanne 1839-1906: Pioneer of Modernism (London: Taschen, 2001), p. 20. 48

natural shapes, but form geometric patterns, as seen in the zigzag formation that constitutes the beanfield. This continues in the trees, where lines form blocks of colour. These geometric forms then mirror the man-made form of the chimneys in the foreground. These chimneys are in fact part of the brickworks at Baldock.116 Geometric line and shape continues in the clouds, completing the unification of the man-made and natural object. The factory, an established icon of industry, typically symbolised negative qualities. Ann Bermingham argues, that after 1860 country and city were culturally defined, in that the city was negative and the country true England.117 Bermingham notes that this continued into the twentieth century, becoming significant in British culture when modernist English art took modernism as a central theme. The symbols of country and modernity have instead been embraced together by Gore, joining field and factory together in geometric patterns. Cezanne also uses line to form blocked shape, as in the dark line that cuts across the field, yet colour is not restricted by line like Gore. Lines become disjointed, allowing colour to integrate as seen on Mont Sainte-Victorie to the right. Where by Britain had been able to accept the idea of industry and nature together by the 1910s, France in 1870 was still undergoing modernisation. Nature is treated more naturally through Cezannes use of line and form, making the cut in the hill appear unsettling and a clear projection of his personal anguish. These themes are further reflected in scale and use of space. The scale of Gores landscape is far-reaching, allowing us to see the majestic scale of the countryside, as 116 Ysanne Holt, British Artists and the Modernist Landscape (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 122. 117 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860 (Calif: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 102-3. 49

well as the place of industry. Although Gore uses simplified shape to create a two- dimensional space, the interplay of positive and negative space through colour allows scale to be felt. Cezanne also shows an expanse of landscape, projecting the magnificent scale of the countryside. The cutting in the hill is given a dominant role here, alluding to the railway which is one of the most potent symbols of Victorian progress and industrialisation at this time.118 Through Cezannes rendering of the subject in a deep blood red, this symbol of industrialisation loses its connotations of positivity. The large scale of the subject then, represents the large personal grief the artist holds over the events that are occurring in LEstaque. Gore has created texture in the space through his use of geometric shape, allowing the painting to remain two-dimensional. This is most keenly felt in the beanfield, where the texture of the field is exaggerated into a pattern. Texture in the fields beyond is rendered obsolete; the fields become reduced to mere shape, integrating once again the man-made chimneys with the surrounding countryside. Ysanne Holt has alluded to the symbolic reflection of Letchworth, through his use of simplified forms: His approach was similar to that of the architects of the new town itself. Holt quotes a town planner who remarked, We tried to combine a certain amount of formality in the plan.119 As a result, Gore uses the inspiration of the Letchworth plan to combine modern and traditional, then celebrate it in the landscape. On the other hand, taking nature and rendering it simplified and visually equal to the splendour of the countryside, may be taken personally as an unhappy scene. The culture for

118 Aidan Cruttenden, The Victorians (London: Evans, 2002), p. 7. 119 Holt, British Artists, p. 122. 50

appreciating rural England was still strong in 1912. Eyes looking upon the work at the time, may have perceived this rather as a melancholic rendering of a revered land. Texture is found more earnestly in The Railway Cutting, where Cezanne allows the texture of the canvas to come through. Brushstrokes are visible across the canvas, especially where rounded brushstrokes form clouds to contrast with the flatter horizontal strokes forming the ground. Equally, the shape of the mountain is carved through the varied lines he produces. Cezanne uses texture to instead distinguish it from modernism. Controversy over the destruction of countryside for railways existed in England at the beginning of the industrial revolution and now such controversy transcended upon France. Camille Pissarro had painted a series of drawings depicting the city as corrupt and the country as peaceful.120. As late as 1900, poetry was still locked in Romanticism in the French provinces. David Coward writes that this poetry with its evocations of sea, landscape, customs and peasant lifeprovided (usually melancholy) glimpses of the provinces.121 By representing nature as society appreciated it, Cezanne made the cutting look all the more intrusive and melancholic. Darkness and light is formed in The Beanfield within the colour palette. Even though the factory in the background is furthest away, it is shown in a light blue shade, whereas the trees are in darker greens and blues. Blue is used primarily to convey shadow and again serves to unify nature with the man-made. In truth, Gores representation of a unified Letchworth did not entirely reflect how those living there felt in reality. It was observed that social classes at Letchworth simply did not mix; 120 John House, Landscapes of France: Impressionism and its Rivals (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995), p. 56. 121 David Coward, History of French Literature From Chanson De Geste to Cinema (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 487. 51

social disharmonies would not disappear. Gore left out any representation of the people of Letchworth, we see only that harmony can exist pictorially.122 His personal interpretation may have been one of joy, but residents may have seen this as a distortion. In light of this, the image takes on a lonely and isolated perspective. In Cezannes landscape, blue is used also as a primary colour but generally to value light within the sky and upon the mountain. Dark red, green and brown impress shadow upon the picture. Cezanne makes his personal melancholic thoughts explicit, rather than eradicating any hidden themes, as Gore does, to create a harmonious image. Therefore Cezanne presents personal melancholy, where Gore prefers a more positive personal interpretation to any representation of social melancholy that may lie beneath. The colour palette Gore uses informs shape and form, not as a tool to portray realism. Colour found in the natural forms have been grouped into patterns, allowing vibrant contrasts of colours, most noticeable in the pastel pinks against dark brown and earthy red in the beanfield. The smoke rising from the brick factory is not simply grey, but is highlighted in dusky purple and white. The colour of smoke becomes one with the colour of the natural clouds, thus becoming part of natures beauty. Gore is reversing the typical associations of the iconicity of smoke. Marroni writes of the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose book North and South speaks of the negative iconicity of industrialisation.123 Literature was full of the smoking chimneys that impose their antiecological message on the Victorian landscape.124 Gore uses his 122 Holt, British Artists, p. 125. 123 Francesco Marroni, Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth- Century English Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), p. 36. 124 Ibid. 52

colour pattern to reunite sky and smoke and to celebrate a culturally melancholic subject. The colour palette for Cezanne informs just the opposite of Gores interpretation. Nature in contrast, is treated realistically in a palette that contains orange, greens, browns, yellows and blues. The deep red cutting becoming the vision of an open wound. Modernism could not escape the French landscape. In fact James M. McMillan warns against us being led into the seductive image of the French countryside as Arcadia. In truth, rural industry was declining in the latter nineteenth century. Therefore much of the rural population welcomed the extension of the rail network.125Thus we can treat Cezannes The Railway Cutting as, more accurately, a personal expression of melancholy than social. The zigzag pattern of Gores work gives the beanfield a rhythmic quality and provides an illusion of movement. The smoke is formed in blocked shapes of semi-circles and waves projecting a gentle movement of puffs of smoke. Gores allowance of giving nature and industry balance, was ironically more of a representation of French society than British. Jack Wood Palmer suggests that Gore was the first to seize on the new movements from France, to examine and assimilate them.126 Rural France had been ready to accept modernism when rural industry was hampered by urban industry. Britain still felt melancholic over the impact of modernism, even by 1912. Samuel Hynes writes that radical thought in the Edwardian era was based on a melancholy mood.127 Gore tried fervently to prevail against this mood. 125 James F. McMillan, La France Profonde, Modernity and National Identity, in John House (ed.), Impressions of France: Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and their Rivals (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), p. 55. 126 Jack Wood Palmer, Spencer Frederick Gore 1878-1914, Exhibition Catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1955), p. 7. 127 Samuel Hynes, Edwardian Turn of Mind (London: Random House, 2011), p. 46. 53

 Cezanne equally could not reflect his own societys foremost attitude. He did not want to be sympathetic towards the intrusion of modernisation. He gives the sky movement by brushstroke, rather than the use of blocked shapes, contrasting with the wound in the landscape. The deep red colour implies it has been freshly cut, with its blocked colour making it dense and still. The natural movement of the fields and mountain constructed with his varied brushstroke, have been destroyed in the cutting, leaving a permanent portrait of a damaged hill and thus suggesting a change that cannot be undone. Cezanne is making clear that the railways are a personally melancholic sight. It would have been interesting to see Gore and Cezanne approach each others subjects; their personal opinions would have been more accurately reflective of that society than their own. Nevertheless, their personal interpretations of modernisation upon the countryside make an intriguing comparison. Melancholy for Cezanne becomes a personal preoccupation in The Railway Cutting. It seems that within society, the opinions of those, such as Cezanne, were in the minority. The work therefore takes on a deep personal significance. He has projected an individual feeling with a deep love for nature and contrasting it with the wound. Gore also rejects the prominent feeling within his society to challenge the melancholic culture associated with urbanisation and replace it with appreciation. But behind the faade, Letchworth was not the picture of harmony Gore wanted us to believe. Therefore what can be taken as an optimistic picture, becomes tinged with social melancholy in retrospect. Yet Gores primary aim was to console a symbol of cultural melancholy, the factory, with the positive image of nature, to prove that both can be

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harmonious. He achieved an appreciation of his subject, which gave meaning and gravity to his painting just as he idolised in Cezanne. Passion in subject was shared, even if their opinion on modernisation was not.

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iii) An Analysis of Childhood Nostalgia and Melancholy

Figure 9. Robert Bevan, A Street Scene in Belsize Park, a House at Hampstead, London, 1917. Oil on canvas (75 x 90.3 cm) Museum of London.

Figure 10. Paul Gauguin, The Sacred Mountain (Parahi Te Marae), 1892. Oil on canvas (66 x 88.9 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.

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 Well before the Camden Town Group had formed, Robert Bevan had met Paul Gauguin with a common aim. In 1891, Bevan had travelled to Brittany to find a primitive and unspoilt environment for inspiration. Gauguin and himself would work together, where Gauguin would become his chief influence.128 It would be too simple however, to merely indulge in their work at this point. When Bevan and Gauguin display fascinating similarities is in their work, it happens to occur when the artists depart on their own separate paths; Gauguin to Tahiti and Bevan to London. It is imperative that these paintings are taken within the context of their time. Bevans A Street Scene in Belsize Park [Fig. 9] is notable for its completion during World War I and its significance becomes more poignant. Gauguins The Sacred Mountain (Parahi Te Marae) [Fig. 10], was painted during his time in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893. However, the paradise which he envisioned was shattered when he saw French colonisation meant virtually nothing now remained of the traditional religion, mythology and art.129 What Bevan and Gauguin achieved in their paintings, was a childlike nostalgia for what had been lost in their respective subject. Each is tinged with a nostalgic eye that also becomes layered with cultural and personal melancholy under observation. The use of line is very important to Bevans A Street Scene in Belsize Park. Frances Stenlake writes, that much like Spencer Gore, Bevan uses a horizontal and vertical grid to achieve composition.130 Line does not define texture, but rather it forms simple shapes that lack detail. The motorised taxi-cab for example, looks two-dimensional as a result. For Gauguin, his use of line achieves a similar goal, in that the fence is formed by 128 Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 61. 129 Alan Bowness, The Great Artists Collection: Gauguin (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1971), p. 11. 130 Francis Stenlake, Robert Bevan: From Gauguin to Camden Town (London: Unicorn Press, 2008), p. 146. 57

simple outlining, rendering it two-dimensional. Bevan admired Gauguin for his bold patterning and clearly it had a lasting impact. It served well in achieving a childlike quality to Bevans work that Gauguin found reflective of his subject. Gauguin was consistent in wanting to find in his art a connection to his childhood time spent in South America. He reproached the fast, industrial lifestyle that was encroaching upon France, as discovered within View of the rooftops in Paris by Van Gogh. He was always looking backwards towards memories of childhood. His use of line in this way and the childlike quality it had, reminds us of Gauguins attempts to reach his roots. For Bevan, using this technique also brings to mind a childlike image. Using darker outlines to form shapes is reminiscent of a childs picture book. Gauguin also uses this visibly on the green trees. Bevan is using this technique symbolically to evoke in us the feelings of childhood and innocence. It becomes all the more poignant and distant when we take into account that innocence has been lost through war. Bevan is continuing the Victorian tendency for cultural retrospection, which continued into the twentieth century for reassurance. The tragic impact of war on youth can be expressed through the poem In A Soldiers Hospital I: Pluck written by Eva Dobell, a volunteer nurse during World War I. She writes: A child-so wasted and so white, So broke with pain, he shrinks in dread.131 This is a candid illustration of the recruiting racket that allowed boys younger than the requisite age to join up; the boy in this poem being just seventeen and maimed for life.132 Bevan allowed his work a childlike innocence which these boys had tragically lost. 131 Eva Dobell, In A Soldiers Hospital I: Pluck (1919), in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 207. 132 Nosheen Khan, Womens Poetry of the First World War (Kentucky: University of Kentucky, 1988), p. 126 58

 The lack of texture to Bevans work means that the pictorial plain appears still. Brushstroke is not obvious, instead it is line and form which dominates. As a result, areas of the space, including the road and the sky, appear empty. Without looking at the time of this painting or knowing its location, Bevan creates a calm and sedate scene for the viewer. However, we know as well as those in 1917, that a catastrophic war has been raging since 1914 and thus the scene instantly takes on a shared nostalgic mood. The dominating building, in the middle of the space, does not give clue to its purpose, yet in fact it was a preparatory school. It also had personal connotations for Bevan, for his son attended there.133 Bevan did not use obvious iconography to infer childlike innocence, but rather hid it within the subject, then most overtly portraying it within his painting style. Within a time of social melancholy, he used a personal place that nostalgically reflected the innocence of a by-gone era. This was not Victorian whimsical nostalgia, but something much deeper felt personally and socially. It is very reflective of an Edwardian society that was delving into nostalgia to alleviate the pessimism since Queen Victorias death. After 1906, novels tended toward bleaker ends.134 In The Sacred Mountain, Gauguin makes his brushstrokes more visible. As a result, the flowing upward motion of the brushstrokes he uses for the yellow expanse, purple flowers and mountain, inform movement more that Bevan. The statue and trees which fall between the background and foreground, uses smaller brushstrokes and are far greater in likeness to Bevans work by creating simple childlike images. Gauguin used greater use of symbolism than Bevan, which is most evident in the boldly outlined statue. Part of Gauguins childlike manner was in his ability to create a scene which did 133 Stenlake, Robert Bevan, p. 146. 134 Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 49. 59

not exist but had meaning. He melancholically lamented on the destruction of Tahitian life and sought to restore the barbaric side of traditional culture. Robert Goldwater has described the statue as a strange combination, put together out of Maori legends (or Gauguins interpretation of them), his notion of primitive religion and the cult of the dead.135 He was not the first painter to borrow motifs from the East, indeed Delacroix and Alexandre Decamps had preceded him.136 What made Gauguin unique, was his childlike imagination for combining motifs that reflected the myth of a mountain where human sacrifices were made. The skulls in the fence also allude to a dark history, by relying on their connotation of death. His own personal childlike dreams are therefore being exuberantly portrayed, whilst portraying also a deeply melancholic place. By comparison, Bevan uses a realistic scene, with hidden personal undertones which can be appreciated by a wider culture. Gauguins painting was more a personal interpretation of his childlike dreams. A palette of creams, browns, blues and grey is employed throughout A Street scene in Belsize. The dark red used for the door and post in the centre, is the only diversion from a very subdued and cool palette. The creamy colour that envelops the sky area is also reflected in the buildings and street, unifying the space. The mood created, is reminiscent of the light at dusk, with the last remaining sunlight fading. At the beginning of the war it was believed that it would be all over by Christmas. By 1917 this rose tinted view was crushed. Between July and December of 1917 alone, British

135 Harry Gilbert Carlson, Out of Inferno: Strindbergs Reawakening as an Artist (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 288. 136 Ibid. 60

casualties numbered 448,614.137 The faded appearance of this scene makes it appear as if this place is merely a faded memory. As noted in chapter one, the idea that nature could reflect a subjective feeling of melancholy and nostalgia had already gathered force by the end of the eighteenth century.138 The warmth created by the yellow beige and the dusky pink of fading sunlight are reflected in the leaves, serving to create a nostalgic mood created by nature. The block colours, which are very evident in the buildings in the left background, also emphasize the childlike approach to Bevans technique borrowed from Gauguin. It is again serving as a symbol of the childlike innocence which Bevan is trying to instil, becoming a reminder of the innocence that society had in early 1914 but lost by 1917. The work consequently reveals social nostalgia reflected in a place of personal significance. For Gauguin, his palette is far brighter, relying on his non-naturalistic style of bold, flat, bright colours. Intense red and orange flowers lie with the purple foliage, where the bright yellow mountain leads the eye into the background where vivid green and red informs the trees. The mountain in the background does not shy away, for Gauguin paints this feature in bright purples and orange underneath a blue and lilac sky. For Gauguin, colour had symbolic meaning evoking human emotions. The French poet, Stphane Mallarm, was the most important mouthpiece for this theory. He stated: to suggest that is the dream. That is the perfect use of a mystery that constitutes symbol.139 Gauguin used this method throughout his paintings. Yellow, which

137 Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields: Passchendaele 1917(London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 304. 138 Chapter 1, find page Reference page when pages numbered 139 Mary Acton, Learning to Look at Modern Art (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 111. 61

represents joy, has been used to dominate the centre of the painting.140 Purple and flowers symbolise passion, to express the beauty of a civilisation he saw crumbling. This dreamlike vision, however a personal expression, was not without an element of shrewd calculation. Ingo Walther argues that he shared his longing for a distant paradise with the whole of high society.141 He therefore used such a mystic image to connect with those to whom he was selling his paintings. The scale of Bevans work has been informed by its layout. This is the fork of Buckland Crescent and Belsize Park, which was only a short walk away from the family home.142 From this perspective, the eye is able to see a large section of the area, including the two women and a dog on the far right, to the taxi moving away from us to the left. The two women in the corner are dressed fashionably, a visual symbol of their status as respectable women. Apart from these women, the dog, and the man driving the taxi, there appears to be no other life. This silence is discomforting and unsettling within a scene that is portrayed in such a childlike manner. This absence seems to evoke the life that has been missing during war. Movement within the scene is stilted, even the taxi does not imply movement. The inclusion of the motorised-taxi cab is interesting, for Bevan is best known for his nostalgic paintings of declining horse cabs. The image of the taxi would, for viewers at the time, have represented modernisation and change. In the beginning of 1917, London had 191 electric taxicabs and a year later, they would become more frequent 140 Anne Barskaya, Paul Gauguin (New York: Parkstone, 1996), p. 34. 141 Ingo F. Walther, Paul Gauguin: 1848-1903: The Primitive Sophisticate (New York: Taschen, 1999), p. 7. 142 Museum of London, A Street Scene in Belsize Park by Robert Bevan, http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/64886/robert-polhill-bevan-a-street- scene-in-belsize-park (Accessed February 2 2012). 62

than horse cabs.143 Bevans inclusion of the taxi and a move away from painting the horse and cab had, according to Bevans son, reflected his anxiety over being accused of sentimentalising a feature of London that was disappearing.144 However, given its childlike appearance, reminiscent of a toy car, this is no painting hailing modernisation. Rather it serves as a symbol of London at the time, a reminder of a life continuing soberly back in England, trying to maintain its innocence. Bevan understood well the changes that war brought. His good friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had died aged just twenty-three when fighting in the French army. This would have, according to Stenlake, particularly saddened the Bevans.145 The young age of so many of those killed during the war, make the childlike painting of Bevans scene all the more symbolic of youth and lost innocence. Showing the home front in such an innocent manner, allowed Bevan to be more nostalgic rather than overtly melancholic. Gauguin has used grand scale to greater effect than Bevan, in that all features are given distant size and shape, so that nothing is lost in the space. Gauguin is filling the viewers eye with his childlike vision. Where Bevan uses space and silence to provoke our minds into lost childlike, Gauguin vibrantly uses all the space to express how brilliant the lost primitive traditional life of his ancestors was. Bevan uses absence as a reminder of socially felt melancholy, where Gauguin has shown extrovertly what is missing. The two-dimensional space allows him to create a nostalgic dream of a fast- disappearing society. As a result, although nostalgic, Gauguins image is far more optimistic, where Bevans nostalgia is tinged with a deeply felt social melancholy. 143 Gijs Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 135. 144 Connett, Walter Sickert, p. 65. 145 Stenlake, Robert Bevan, p. 124. 63

Gauguins nostalgia for his childhood memories were free to be more joyful and expressive by comparison. Only the symbolism in the image becomes an indication of darker themes. By using a childlike technique, Gauguin mastered his unique way of beautifully rendering his dreams onto canvas. His dreamlike approach allowed Bevan to express a completely different subject, but still achieve the same nostalgic qualities. Gauguin used a simplistic, bold approach to visually show dreams of a place he remembered as a child. For a man who was so forward in his approach to paint, he was consistently looking back, desperately trying to imagine a landscape which held meaning in the past. This was a deeply held personal nostalgia that had roots in his childhood and as such was expressed in a childlike manner. Bevan was not so caught up in his personal childhood memories, but used Gauguins childlike expression to present a memory felt more as a social experience. Although Bevan did not dream up A Street Scene in Belsize, there is still a dreamlike quality. This is a scene which would better describe a society before 1914 than one in 1917. Where Gauguin is grasping a personal childhood memory in subject and style, Bevan is grasping innocence and normality reinforced by his childlike approach to painting. In both these works, to gather the melancholic forces that lie beneath, one has to value symbolism and context. Yet whilst Gauguin reflects that a barbaric culture is part of a beautiful past through his use of symbol and colour, Bevan evokes social and cultural melancholy through what is missing. It is intriguing that two such different subjects can

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achieve varied perspectives of childhood nostalgia by using such similar sensory properties.

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iv) An Analysis of Social Nostalgia in the Traditional Country Landscape

Figure 11. Charles Ginner, Clayhidon, Devon, 1913. Oil on canvas (38.4 x 63.9 cm) Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

Figure 12. Camille Pissarro, Ploughing at Eragny, c. 1886. Oil on panel (15.6 x 23.5cm) Private Collection.

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 It is within an appreciation of the countryside that both the Camden Town Group artists and the Post-Impressionists felt the deepest connection. However much the Camden Town artists expressed their love of modern London, just like society at large, they also revelled in the cultural nostalgia of the English countryside. Charles Ginner painted Clayhidon in 1913 [Fig. 11], when he was visiting Applehayes in the Blackdown Hills. A retreat here was owned by the artist Harold Bertram Harrison who, having met Spencer Gore, invited artists to stay. Some of the best anti-modernist work of Bevan, Gore and Ginner were painted here. As Rosamond Billingham points out, these works represent the last possible moment before artists views of the world were irrevocably changed by twentieth century conflicts and technologies.146 For Camille Pissarro, world war was far away when he painted Ploughing at ragny in 1886 [Fig. 12]. Like Ginner however, he appreciated both the modernism of the present and the nostalgic beauty of the past. This particular work was painted during his Neo- Impressionist phase, when he experimented with Georges Seurats Pointillist technique. The mid to late 1880s was a time of great social unrest in Paris and Pissarros attraction to Neo-Impressionism came, according to Levitov and Shiff, from its association to anarchy.147 His rural scenes in ragny displayed a traditional life far from Paris. Both Pissarro and Ginner revelled in social nostalgia and traditionalism, yet achieved it within the harmonious balance of a modernist style. A discussion of line and form is crucial to understand Ginners artistic process in Clayhidon. Ginner first worked from drawings so as to record the landscape with care, 146 Rosalind Billingham, Artists at Applehayes: Camden Town Painters at a West Country Farm (Coventry: Coventry Leisure Services, 1986), p. 32. 147 Karen Levitov and Richard Shiff, Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country (Michigan: University of Michigan, 2007), p. 9. 67

employing a home-made viewfinder with a grid then transferring each element onto paper.148 The result is a finely patterned effect, where line creates form and shape exquisitely, while also informing texture, such as the tiling of the roof on the left building. Special care has been taken in defining the intricate shapes of the fields. This countryside ideal, which was celebrated vastly within Victorian culture, had been a reaction to parliamentary enclosure which was transforming what was left of the old pattern of rural Britain. Ginners use of line appreciates the natural pattern of the English landscape; a fact that poets like Wordsworth had expressed since Romanticism. Definition and form is created in Pissarros work by the Pointillist technique. Through the application of dotted brushstrokes, based on the colour concepts of Ogden Rood, Pissarro relied on visual colour mixing to create an immediate visual sensation. As for form, Pissarros use of dashes gives the fields flow, moving your eye across the pictorial space. The bush on the left is given movement as if blowing in the wind. Evoking the movement and beauty of nature was an important aspect of popular French art. The art critic Lon Lagrange had written in 1864: Nature communicates with us and offers that balm which we gain from the peace of the fields.149 It also communicated a sense of national consciousness according to Anne Dumas.150 Both artists therefore, have used two very different techniques to reflect a nostalgic culture which found pleasure in the landscape. The viewpoint of Ginners landscape is such that the eye can view an expansive landscape. The dominant element is expressed through the cottages which form the 148 Upstone (ed.), Modern Painters, p. 158. 149 Lon Lagrange as quoted in Anne Dumas, The Public Face of Landscape, House (ed.), Landscapes of France, p. 30. 150 Dumas, The Public Face of Landscape, House (ed.), Landscapes of France, p. 30. 68

centre of the pictorial space. We then see its place within the vast surrounding countryside, unifying community with the land. Intricate structured patterning allows us to appreciate the countryside, yet the focus on the cottages and the worker, defined in dark heavy outline, focus our eye on two important icons of the culture of nostalgia. Note also, that Pissarro uses a low viewpoint so that the eye is led over a vast field space, as well as uniting the worker, horse and landscape through his use of the Pointillist technique. Both artists are using a powerful collective image of the typical idyllic countryside that society craved. French intellectuals throughout Pissarros time had explored the theme of city versus countryside, tending to view the countryside idealistically.151 In England, a similar view reigned, where the countryside embodied the ideal base for good society, being in line with human rhythms.152 Ann Colley writes that the convention of the nostalgic imagination in nineteenth- century England is, of course, the pastoral image of the cottage.153 We therefore get a deeper cultural meaning in Ginners work through his inclusion of the iconic English cottage: a very familiar image in Ginners era. The English cottage was part of the national image just as the natural landscape was to France. The image of the hard working pastoral worker is an icon that becomes evident in both of these works. This brings to mind the work of the realist painter Jean-Franois Millet, who famously painted agricultural workers in the French landscape. Unlike Millet, Ginner and Pissarro instead use an idyllic image of the worker to project a dreamlike nostalgic view of rural life. In Victorian culture, rural society became the image of urban escapism. The popularity of Mary Mitfords series Our Village, read widely in London, is testament to 151 Christopher Lloyd, Studies on Camille Pissarro (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 50. 152 Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside, p. 49. 153 Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection, p. 77. 69

this fact. By involving a working figure in the landscape, Ginner welcomes the presence of an image that people identified with a nostalgic idyllic way of life. Christopher Lloyd writes that Pissarro usually painted a peasant, yet not working very hard, as if to escape wistfully from the realities of the present in order to preserve the past.154 These collective cultural icons embody the popular cultural tendency for rural nostalgia which was prominent in both Ginners and Pissarros homeland. Colour becomes a particularly important element of discussion in both of these works. Ysanne Holt notes that landscape painting of the Victorian era and into the Edwardian period addressed both moral order and aesthetic harmony which can be adopted in the interests of aesthetic enquiry or co-opted in the cultural cause.155 Ginner and Pissarros adoption of modern methods of painting allow them to indulge in this aesthetic enquiry, whilst their subjects project the culture for nostalgia. Ginner was heavily influenced by Van Gogh and this is evident in the consistent use of heavy impasto. This creates a dense surface that builds up the landscape, making it appear solid and hard wearing. Van Gogh and Gauguin informed their colour palette by using high key colours were not in all instances naturalistic. Here, the range of purples, from dark to pastel, illuminates the cottage roofs and walls in contrast against the vivid green and orange landscape. The worker, informed in dark green and black, becomes one with the landscape. The use of such a palette allows Ginner to show beauty as he also achieved in projecting beauty within a melancholic urban cityscape. He still allows the subject to present the true image of picturesque nostalgic society, whilst using his

154 Lloyd, Studies on Camille Pissarro, p. 41. 155 Holt, British Artists, p. 7. 70

own individual vision to create an personal image. Yet expressing freedom in his colour palette also projected a social nostalgia for the freedom of rural life. The same illuminating quality is present in Pissarros work. Pointillism, by painting dots and dashes of colour next to one another to allow the eye to mix colour and maintain brightness, worked well for Pissarros vision. Like Ginner, the artist has used a bright palette ranging from blues and white in the sky to dark brown and blacks in the shadow of the bush. As Levitov and Shiff remark, the viscous mass of marks radiate a brilliant light.156 The fields are given illumination that no other technique could achieve to the same degree. Colour allowed Pissarro to illuminate the beauty of nature which was so integral to nostalgic French culture and national identity. Edmond About, a nineteenth century French writer, wrote that landscape can be summed up in one single word, the proudest and sweetest in our language: freedom.157 Camille had written to Lucien later in 1891, that I firmly believe that something of our ideas, born as they are of the anarchist philosophy, passes into our works.158 Pissarro was an antagonist of French bureaucracy and sought to display this within the culturally nostalgic landscape. It was this potent mix of modern style and nostalgic subject that injected Ginner, for as Holt notes, being alive to both French modernism and to the landscape of France such painting complicate simplistic associations of Englishness.159 However, such strong images of landscape and their associations with both English and French cultural identity, make nostalgia an obvious theme. 156 Levitov and Shiff, Camille Pissarro, p. 19. 157 Edmond About as quoted in Dumas, The Public Face of Landscape, House (ed.), Landscapes of France, p. 42. 158 Letter from Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro (Paris, April 13, 1891) in John Rewald, Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980), p. 63. 159 Holt, British Artists, p. 7. 71

 Of all the artists whom have been discussed in this analysis, Ginner and Pissarro appear to have found the most common ground. Although their technique in applying the paint may have been much different, an appreciation of the qualities of the countryside shone through in the same way. Both relied on the typical picturesque view of the English and French countryside that the viewer would be familiar and thus be able to engage with. The artists truly understood the nostalgic culture that existed in both England and France and were able to capitalise on this, by representing a truly picturesque, if idealised, scene. Both Ginner and Pissarro however, were lured by modernist techniques, which adds a whole new dimension. For Pissarro, his brief involvement in Pointillism allowed him to express a personal expression on a subject that was painted over and over again. Ginner, too, was inspired in that the colour palette and construction of a subject, like his idol Van Gogh, could illuminate a nostalgic subject in a whole new perspective. Ginners painting is a true vision of such experimental art of the Camden Town Group and a lasting poignant expression of the innocent culture in which Edwardian society indulged before the terrors of World War I. Pissarros work allows us to see how such innocent social nostalgia was as much a part of culture in France as how it pre-dated the Edwardian period.

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 In the first chapter, melancholy was discussed in its many facets, from its personal to its cultural connotations. Upon reflection, the subsequent chapters prove just how complex the relationship was between society and melancholy. Additionally, personal feelings converge and oppose that of societys, to give very different opposing portrayals of melancholia. It was noted in the introduction that the cityscape was an ideal place to begin this complex journey. Indeed it is Ratcliffes little known painting of Regents Canal that gratifyingly embodies the relationship the group had with the city. They consistently tried to show the city through their eyes, in that they celebrated the good with the bad and made it beautiful, which was so different to cultural perspective. Van Gogh, representing the Post-Impressionists, revealed too, his own personal expression, but his view reflected more readily the cultural viewpoint. Social melancholy was shared equally on both sides of the English channel, yet personal perspective on the city is distinctly different here. Throughout the analytical chapters, we find that, like Van Gogh and Ratcliffe, both Camden Town painter and Post-Impressionist always have an awareness of the impact of melancholy in society as well as their own. Gore, in his representation of industry in the countryside, tries to emulate the ideas that Ratcliffe uses, by finding beauty in a culturally melancholy subject. Again, Cezanne also takes the melancholic and pessimistic view like Van Gogh, in that the railway is nothing to celebrate. Gore is aware of a melancholic societys view and is trying to persuade a different perspective, where Cezanne is trying to persuade the opposite: to engage a personally melancholy

Conclusion

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viewpoint onto a rural society optimistic about the railway. This is a complex analysis, yet as one can see two paintings which appear so different, they actually share similar subjects and goals, even if their perspective on melancholy is so different. Childhood nostalgia was a theme appreciated by Gauguin especially and Bevan was also an artist who achieved such an appreciation in his work. Yet, just as before, a common theme is viewed and portrayed very differently. This naturally comes down to personal circumstances and timing, namely Gauguins nature for retrospection and Bevans work being painted during World War I. Childhood nostalgia not only allows Gauguin to be personally expressive, but also indulges his clientele who have a passion for cultural nostalgia. Gores childhood nostalgia is more deeply felt, not so much a whimsical yearning for the past, but a melancholic social nostalgia that becomes more potent during wartime. However different the reason for showing childhood nostalgia, both artists display the same goal in showing innocence in a society that is passing. By this point in the analysis, we find similarities between subject is also steadily progressing into similarities in personal and social perspective. The culmination of a subject and perspective shared is ultimately found in comparing Ginner and Pissarro and their works on the English and French countryside. Such paintings project two societies similar cultural nostalgia for the countryside as well as using two different, but similarly effective techniques, in colourfully displaying a national symbol. Cultural nostalgia, as a remedy for increased industrialisation, becomes displayed in the painting art form, which side by side with literature, becomes an important outlet for such wistfulness. Ultimately, it is these two artists which display how similar a connection the group had with their Post-Impressionist counterparts, by sharing a personal and social connection with melancholy and its nostalgia.

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 The theme of melancholy and nostalgia within the landscape paintings of the Camden Town Group and other Post-Impressionists, is a theme well worth exploring. They share a deepest appreciation for social and cultural melancholy however different it might be felt from their own personal opinion on the subject. In nostalgia, both sides of the coin found a similar social connection and this becomes most closely embodied within the country landscape. This thesis has also discovered that these connections have been found in using similar subject matter and culturally significant iconography that reflects both the social and cultural significance of melancholy in industry and the cultural nostalgia of rural society. Although the Camden Town Group used styles that they adopted from their idols, they used these to portray similar iconography but in a more optimistic light. It is in the form of nostalgia that we see similar artistic technique used most optimally to achieve similar perspective. As a final thought, the reader might think of exploring deeper into the Camden Town Group and its close association with the rise of Post-Impressionist technique in England. This thesis has endeavoured to show their work from a melancholic perspective, especially of those artists little written about, and display the many admirable qualities of their work. In analysis, melancholia had a clearly perceptible place in the society in which both the Post-Impressionists and Camden Town Group worked and its significance is particularly noteworthy. All of these artists endeavoured to display melancholy in either its darkest or most nostalgic forms. They found similar ways in which to inform us of their personal and social views of the subject, yet their interpretations differed significantly in the cityscape. A reflection perhaps of Frances later arrival of industrialisation, making personal opinions more dominate, where melancholy had firmly become entrenched into the English psyche by the twentieth

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century. The country landscape was the ultimate connection for these artists, an image of nostalgia and escape from melancholy, much as it is viewed to this very day.

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Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. C.D. Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1809-1810. Oil on canvas (110 x 171.5 cm).Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Primary source material: published Charles Baudelaire, Autumn Song from Flowers of Evil (1857), in Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 232. Charles Baudelaire and A. Van Bever (ed.), Journaux Intimes (Paris: Cres, [1887] 1999). Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London: Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1902). Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (New York: Harper & Bros, 1858). Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Volume 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858). Eva Dobell, In A Soldiers Hospital I: Pluck (1919), in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 207. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Harper & Bros, 1892). Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia in Collected Papers Vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, [1917] 1967. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words Are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. 9th ed.4 vols (London: Longman, [1755] 1805). Carolyn Kiser Anspach (ed) and Johannes Hofer, Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, 1688, Bulletin of the History of Medicine by Johannes Hofer, 2 (1934). Letter from Harold Gilman to Mrs Pissarro (25 March 1914), in Maureen Connett, Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group (Devon: David and Charles, 1992), p. 44. Letter from Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro (Paris, April 13, 1891) in John Rewald, Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980), p. 63.

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Judith Terry, Tobi Bruce, Janice Anderson and Danielle Chaput, Lasting Impressions: Celebrated Works of the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2005), p. 82. Robert Upstone (ed.), Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group (London: Tate Publishing, 2008). Ingo F. Walther, Paul Gauguin: 1848-1903: The Primitive Sophisticate (New York: Taschen, 1999). Website references Museum of London, A Street Scene in Belsize Park by Robert Bevan, http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/64886/robert-polhill-bevan-a-street- scene-in-belsize-park (Accessed February 2 2012). Oxford English Dictionary, Melancholy, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/melancholy (accessed 15 February 2012). Oxford English Dictionary, Nostalgia, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nostalgia (accessed 15 February 2012). Tate Online, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot: A Biography http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1510&pag e=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio (13 December 2011).

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