“Go back, for God’s sake, Mr Ginner to the Louvre….”

When the Camden Town painter Charles Ginner launched an excoriating attack on Poussin in his "Neo-realist" manifesto of 1914, Sickert leaped to the Frenchman's defence...

"My second quarrel with Mr. Ginner is his inclusion, in the list of merely derivative painters, of Poussin. Go back, for God’s sake, Mr. Ginner, to the Louvre, and look at three passages in Poussin. Look at the painting of the vermilion chariot of Flora. Look at the living baby turning to his dead mother’s breast in the Plagues of Egypt, and look at the curve in the blade of a long sword the tip of which rests on some books in a kind of still life trophy under an apotheosis. Look at these three passages and fiche me the peace with your Cézanne!"

Thanks to Gareth Hawker for this montage of Poussin details.

Ginner’s riposte to Sickert’s objection can also be found on the Camden Town pages of the Tate.