A Corner in Chelsea

Ginner, born in France of British parents, had trained as a painter in Paris. He moved to London towards the end of 1909, settling in Chelsea where his sister and his mother lived. The following year, he announced his presence by showing three paintings at the 1910 exhibition of the Allied Artists' Association which had been created in 1908 as a non-jury platform for international as well as British contemporary artists (indeed Ginner, still in Paris, had sent some black-and-white illustrations to the opening exhibition, but they passed unnoticed). A Corner in Chelsea was Ginner's most ambitious entry in 1910. Large, highly coloured, boldly textured, startling in composition and innovative in subject, it could hardly be overlooked even amid thousands of exhibits in a space as huge as the Albert Hall. On the alphabetically selected hanging committee of this democratic, non-jury institution, Ginner's surname brought him together with Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore. The three G's formed an immediate kinship. Ginner, with his French looks and manners and first-hand knowledge of French Post-Impressionism, at once became an exciting addition to the Saturday 'At Homes' over which Sickert presided at 19 Fitzroy Street, cradle of the Camden Town Group.

Urban subjects, London subjects in particular, were Ginner's special contribution to the language of Camden Town painting. Over the next four years his London views included Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, The Angel Islington, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London Bridge, The Sunlit Square (Victoria), and The Tube Station, Kings Cross. His example undoubtedly encouraged his Fitzroy Street and Camden Town colleagues, namely Bevan, Drummond, Gilman, Gore, Sickert and Ratcliffe, to paint their immediate neighbourhoods and beyond. Ginner came to the vibrant and unfamiliar scenes around him in London with an innocent eye, hence his inventive notion of painting roofscapes. A Corner in Chelsea introduced this distinctive theme into Ginner's personal vocabulary; he would go on to paint the roofs of Leeds, Hampstead and Belfast, among other cities.

Ginner had begun to make pochades, that is little oil sketches on board or wood, of London roofscapes in 1909. Two are listed in his Notebooks: Battersea Roofs (Vol. I, p. x) and Whistler Chimneys (Vol. I, p. xi). Whistler Chimneys is probably the painting now known as Chelsea (offered at Sotheby's, 13 May 1987, lot 97 and 2 March 1988, lot 110), an upright study for A Corner in Chelsea, featuring - from foreground to horizon - the big house on the corner, smoking chimneys and St Luke's Church. Looking at the geography of the roofscape, with St Luke's viewed from east to west, it is likely that Ginner painted from an upper room in a house somewhere to the north of Cale Street.

Ginner's manuscript Notebooks (now in Tate Archives) have been quoted above. In them he recorded his pictures, their dates, measurements, where and when they were exhibited, to whom they were sold and for how much. A Corner in Chelsea cost Major Brody £26.5.0. The notebooks are an invaluable, if not infallible, guide to Ginner's work over from 1907 until 1947. The first five years or so of the first volume was compiled retrospectively and inevitably there are ommisions and mistakes. However, the catalogue note to the 1985 exhibition at The Fine Art Society erred in claiming that Ginner was mistaken in recording the inclusion of A Corner in Chelsea in the 1910 Allied Artists' exhibition on the grounds that Ginner's friend and patron, Benjamin Fairfax Hall, claimed the artist had not visited London before the opening of the show in July 1910. The mistake was Hall's (who did not know Ginner at that time), not Ginner's. Indeed, Ginner's atmospheric roofscape was singled out for praise by Frank Rutter in his review of the exhibition (Sunday Times, 17 July 1910).

W.B.