The Camden Town Murder
Encyclopedia
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
painted in 1908. The paintings have specific titles, such as the problem picture
Problem picture
A problem picture is a genre of art popular in the late Victorian era, characterised by a deliberately ambiguous narrative that can be interpreted in several different ways, or which portrays an unresolved dilemma. It is the pictorial equivalent of the problem play...
What Shall We Do for the Rent or What Shall We Do to Pay the Rent.
The title of the group refers to the "Camden Town Murder
Camden Town Murder
The Camden Town Murder was a murder which took place in Camden Town, London in 1907. Robert Wood, an artist, was tried for the murder of Emily Dimmock, a prostitute and acquitted after a brilliant defence by Edward Marshall Hall....
" case of 1907. On 11 September Emily Dimmock, a part-time prostitute cheating on her partner, was murdered in her home at Agar Grove (then St Paul's Road), Camden, having gone there from The Eagle public house, Royal College Street. After sex, the man had slit her throat open while she was asleep, then left in the morning. The murder became an ongoing source of prurient sensationalism in the press. For several years Sickert had already been painting lugubrious female nudes on beds, and continued to do so, deliberately challenging the conventional approach to life painting—"The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name of 'the nude' represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy"—giving four of them, which included a male figure, the title, The Camden Town Murder, and causing a controversy, which ensured attention for his work. These paintings do not show violence, however, but a sad thoughtfulness, explained by the fact that three of them were originally exhibited with completely different titles, one more appropriately being What Shall We Do for the Rent?, and the first in the series, Summer Afternoon.
Further reading
- Wright, Barnaby, et al, Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 2007. ISBN 9781903470596