Sunday

This is Still Life By The Fire by William Ratcliffe, painted in about 1920. It’s a a prime example of Painting I’d Like In My House versus Painting I Am Able To Admire But No Thanks.

William Ratcliffe was influenced by the Camden Town Group of painters, a collective of 16 artists that included Walter Sickert (spooky paintings, like nausea. Sickert was at one point suspected of being Jack the Ripper - he wasn’t, but you could see how people thought he might be. Sickert was not a jolly vibe).

The Group lived or worked in then working-class Camden, north London, before the First World War, and sought to depict the realties of modern urban life in all its cultural and social variety. They were interested in painting real life and in representing it truthfully. Accordingly, the paintings are unshowy and modest. Sometimes the world they depict is very frayed and shabby around the edges.

The limelight got grabbed by the Bloomsbury Group, who were operating at about the same time, and whose exhilarating, highly decorative paintings are less murky, less ambiguous and far ‘prettier’ - no fish and chip shops, no market traders, no working class people in unglamorous interiors. But the Camden Town Group was, and remains, easily as influential.

Anyway: William Ratcliffe, previously a wallpaper designer, was influenced by the group because for a time he lived next door to one of its prominent members, Harold Gilman, in Letchworth Garden City. The Camden Town Group was born from the ashes of the Fitzroy Street Group, an earlier collective, which was still going at this time. Gilam encouraged Ratcliffe to come to their soirées, and to attend evening classes at the Slade.

But our painting is wholesome, comfortable and prosperous. I love those really fat, round apples on the blue-green dish (not un-Bloomsbury, actually), and the enormous teacup. The walnuts tell us it’s winter. The pink of the walls is perfect. The whole thing is harmonious, reassuring, intimate. If you are in the UK watching this morning’s hoar frost melt away, the scene painted here is the ideal scenario for about 4pm this afternoon. I was just thinking, looking at it, how lovely it would be to have a round table in front of the fire, rather than a coffee table or ottoman or sofa. What could be nicer than tea by the hearth? Nothing, except maybe a really cosy Sunday night supper.

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