Founded in 1911 and active in London before World War I, the Camden Town Group played an important role in the development of a distinctively modern British visual art. Its sixteen members promoted modern art’s engagement with a modern world and, in particular, with the minutiae of everyday urban life across a range of characteristic subjects. These subjects included views of street corners, portraits of local girls, shabby bedsit rooms and theatre and music hall interiors, as represented, for example, in Spencer Gore’s The Balcony at the Alhambra (c.1911–1912). The group held only three official exhibitions, all between June 1911 and December 1912 at the Carfax Gallery, London, but the group’s members participated in a great many more contemporaneous events and displays that contributed to the burgeoning British post-impressionist art scene.

A list of members includes: Walter Bayes, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Frederick Gore, Duncan Grant (following Doman Turner’s death in September 1911), James Dickson Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, James Bolivar Manson, Lucien Pissarro (the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro), William Ratcliffe, Walter Sickert, and John Doman Turner.