Impressionists & Post-Impressionists in England.
In 1905 a group of artists foregathered in Sickert’s rooms in Bloomsbury. This assembly included Spencer Gore, Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan (above), Walter Bayes and Charles Ginner. Most of these artists were influenced by post-impressionism, and in 1910 they would form the Camden Town Group which included Innes, Wyndham Lewis and Manson. However, a few of them remained faithful to the original aesthetics of impressionism. The most obvious link between Impressionism and the Camden Town Group was Lucien Pissarro, son of one of the original impressionists Camille Pissarro; Pissarro fills settled in London in 1893 and was naturalised in 1916. Pissarro père had in fact fled to London- along with Monet- to escape the Franco-Prussian War in 1877 where he had studied Turner’s paintings in the London museums. Linking impressionism in England with last week’s session on the evolution of the portrait, we must also remember the influence of the impressionist brushstroke on portraits, of which the greatest exponent was John Singer Sargent, head of what Sickert contemptuously called “the wriggle-and-chiffon school of portraiture.” Though Sargent scored his greatest successes as a portrait painter, he painted sketches and watercolours of landscapes and cities like Venice. And of course he painted in an impressionist manner Monet at work on a landscape. Sargent’s great rival Augustus John never really took to impressionism; his landscapes of the early twentieth-century such as The Blue Pool are more conservative in style. It is probably the case that John only took from French artistic culture the Bohemian image; but he had little sympathy for the audacious modern art that was attracting enterprising members of the Slade. It is unsurprising that in his memoirs he was reserved about the new developments on the continent; he states that he much preferred Picasso’s Commedia dell’arte drawings (which he was shown by the artist in Paris) and paintings over his “cubistic experiments.”[1]
[1] Augustus John, Chiaroscuro, 62.
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