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Published: 16 June, 2011

THE Fine Art Society’s Centenary Exhibition of the Camden Town Group opened yesterday (Wednesday), exactly 100 years to day since the group’s first exhibition in 1911. Some 70 pictures are on display, many of which have never been seen in public before.

The Camden Town Group was at the forefront of modern art in Britain in the years running up to the First World War. 

The artists took as their subject matter the everyday lives of ordinary Londoners and the glitter and grime of the modern city itself. Painted in the dry, crusty paint and pulsating Post-Impressionist colour harmonies of Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan, or the darker, sleeker Old Master tones of Walter Sickert, the Camden Town Group introduced new modes of painting to Britain, inspired by the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Degas.

The Group took its name from the then seedy district of London where Sickert lived, an area that he claimed “had been so watered with his tears that something important must sooner or later spring from its soil”. 

Sickert was the charismatic leader and great wit of the Group who held a firm commitment to capturing the beauty and pathos of ordinary life. His subjects were nudes, chars and coster girls, painted in the diffuse light of north London bedrooms and essentially Sickert was an Impressionist painter devoted to the fleeting effects of light, and who had learned his craft directly from his friends Whistler, Degas, Monet and Pissarro.

The Fine Art Society’s exhibition will be the only one to mark the centenary of the Group’s founding. Works for sale will be accompanied by a small number of loans. 

The exhibition has a fully illustrated catalogue with text by Robert Upstone, who also curated the show.

• The Camden Town Group Centenary Exhibition is at The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, W1, until July 14, Monday to Friday, 10am-6pm, Saturday, 11am-4pm, 020 7629 5116, www.faslondon.com