Modern Painters : The Camden Town Group

The Camden Town Group of British painters chronicled the changes in British society and the rapidly developing city of London in the years immediately before and during the First World War. Their primary focus was on modernity and metropolitan existence, in an age when the horse-drawn cab was being replaced with the motorcar and the values of the preceding century were being challenged as never before. They painted portraits of working-class subjects and in particular, in the case of Walter Sickett, Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, created images of women as explicit as anything being produced in Europe at the time. Beyond the metropolis they captured the development of utopian garden cities like Letchworth and developed a new visual language for portraying Britain's unchanging rural landscape.
Accompanying the first major exhibition of the Camden Town Group for twenty years this book explores how these radically modern artists reflected the immerse changes that were taking place around them. These culminated in the catastrophic war that engulfed Europe in 1914, which they depicted from the Home Front, in dramatic scenes of war work, hospital wards and munitions factories.

The Camden Town Group of British painters chronicled the changes in both British society and the developing city of London in the years before and during the First World War. Accompanying the first major exhibition of the Camden Town Group, this book explores how these modern artists reflected the immense change that was taking place around them.