We have included one of the finest works by Walter Greaves, a working-class boatman in Chelsea, who later became pupil and studio assistant to Whistler. Clare Atwood, another contemporary of both Whistler and Sickert, albeit a lesser known woman artist, shared a love of urban life and theatre with Sickert. She lived in a ménage à trois with dramatist Christabel Marshall and the actress, theatre director, producer and costume designer Edith Craig, from 1916 until Craig's death in 1947. Atwood was loosely associated with the avant-garde Camden Town group, whose members included Sickert and Frederick Spencer Gore, as she regularly exhibited work alongside them at the New English Art Club. A rare and significant work hangs in the gallery at Carnaby Street; most of Atwood’s other known work hangs in public collections including the Tate Britain and her home at Smallhythe Place. Here she has treated this bustling early morning market scene much as she would her theatrical works, climbing up into the rafters at Billingsgate to give us this vertiginous view.
Of the (undeservedly) lesser known artists on the walls, we showed both Doris Zinkeisen and Ethelbert White at The Fine Art Society within their lifetimes, and held a major retrospective of White’s work shortly after his death. Several of the artists and designers shown here were also rescued from obscurity by the gallery: we first exhibited Joseph Southall in 1907, Christopher Dresser in 1972, while Charles Ashbee and The Guild of Handicraft were first shown in 1981.
