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Walter Sickert and the image of Camden Town

This essay breaks new ground in considering the relationship between the early twentieth century paintings of Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, and the place where they were painted. The moralising criticism of the paintings, particularly those of nudes on iron beds in furnished rooms, has led to a consistent conflation of the image in the painting with the image of the place. Camden Town itself has come to be regarded as grimy, disreputable and morally ambiguous at best. The author shows in this essay through investigation of census returns and related reports that this persistent reading is very wide of the mark. Mornington Crescent at the time of Sickert’s residence, was neither overcrowded nor depraved. Camden Town, in the words of one resident, was ‘shabby-genteel,’ a reading confirmed in literary sources, rather than a den of iniquity; the paintings were celebrations of the ordinary life in which Sickert revelled, rather than the squalid. Camden Town, an unremarkable North London suburb with a normal London estate development of terraced houses built on 99 year leases has been calumnied repeatedly by those responsible for the (over elaborate and misleading) interpretation of paintings. The approach here is significant because in the wide range of literature on Sickert, it is the first essay to attempt unravelling painting and place. It is also unusual in making clear that the current museological pabulum which passes for interpretation with prominently displayed panels which seem to have no input from curators who might know what they are talking about, is insulting to the intelligence of the visitor. These represent a dumbing-down in the cause of ‘accessibility’, failing to acknowledge the complexity and multifarious readings inherent in good painting.