MUSE WATSON MURDER SHE WROTE FULL
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13 But this is to overlook what Sickert’s audience knew, and how Sickert prompted them. Of course Hilton Kramer is right to insist that as ‘literature’ the Camden Town paintings ‘are not very informative on the basis of the painted marks on the canvas – which is to say, from what we actually see with our own eyes’ and that if we compare L’Affaire de Camden Town 1909 with Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour 1907 (fig.9), in the broken and impasted touch, the use of light, the claustrophobic intimism, ‘there is no significant difference between them as paintings’.

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The catalogues are full of “gold” and “silver”, of “amethyst” and “opal”.’ 12) Where Whistler’s titles rule out narrative, Sickert’s invite it. (Sickert hated Whistler’s titles, complaining that he cried out in them ‘for the qualities he failed to get within the rectangle of his frames. This was Whistler’s innovation in the 1860s it was intended to signal his painterly ambitions and direct the viewer to the formal properties of the work. They may be flatly generic or descriptive ( Still Life, The Retreat from Moscow) or they may allude to the formal properties of the work ( Symphony in White, Nocturne in Black and Gold).

They cue the audience in particular ways. 10 Titles do more than designate works (to ‘prevent us from mislaying them’ 11). Photo © Art Gallery of South Australia, AdelaideThe fact that the titles were (re)used for different purposes does not mean that they did not mean anything – to Sickert, in terms of resources and motivation to contemporaries, who took them as meaningful reference points (expecting a picture called The Camden Town Murder to have something to do with a murder in Camden Town) or to us. They were more likely titled for the purpose of exhibiting them separately in January 1911, and in advance of the first public exhibition of the Murder paintings in Britain that June. But there is no evidence that the titles of the drawings are earlier or more apposite, since both drawings and paintings were produced two to three years earlier. We might consider that the titles of the drawings fix the meanings of the paintings – that we should read the ambiguities of The Camden Town Murder, for example, by reference to an idea of ‘consolation’ rather than violence. In each case the resonance of the image shifts with the title. 8 The copies in the Tate Gallery Library are annotated with comments and sketches, and from these it emerges that the drawing of a clothed man in conversation with a naked woman on a bed, etched as The Camden Town Murder, was exhibited as A Consultation La Belle Gâtée or The Camden Town Murder as Persuasion (fig.7) and The Camden Town Murder or What shall we do for the Rent? as Consolation (fig.8). First, because he used alternative titles for the same images and sometimes overlapping titles for different ones and second, because there are at its margins peripheral works – like Dawn: Camden Town – which share the locality, the bedroom interiors and the sinister charge, but without any reference to murder in their titles.Īnna Robins has published pages from the catalogues for the Carfax Gallery exhibitions of 19 (fig.6).

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3) The exact boundaries of Sickert’s series are rather fuzzy. four walls spoke only of the silent shades of the past, watching us in the quiet dusk’. (Sickert sought these rooms out: where a friend saw only ‘a forlorn hole, cold, cheerless’, he saw ‘the contre-jour lighting that he loved, stealing in through a small single window, clothing the poor place with light and shadow.

2 What they have in common is a sifting of the formal and psychological possibilities available in the juxtaposition of a clothed man, with a naked woman on an iron bedstead, in a ‘third floor back’. ‘The Camden Town Murder’ is both the name of an event, christened in the newspapers, and the title of a painting – indeed the umbrella title for a series of images.

Muse watson murder she wrote