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Trained in Paris first as an architect and later as a painter, Ginner was particularly suited to the pictorial exploration of London's streets and squares, a subject he pursued with increasing commitment from 1912 on. In the present picture he cleverly plays off itinerant stalls such as that of the fruit seller at the center against fixed store-fronts, some of whose painted awnings are visible at the right. Framed in the shadow of monumental buildings that tower over the street market on both sides, the central stalls seem to teeter on the brink of collapse, their awnings haphazardly posed and apparently ready to fall with the next strong gust of wind. The piles of vibrantly colored fruit carefully balanced atop wooden crates, themselves perilously poised on the uneven cobblestones, suggest the vitality and transience of the market. The whole scene is anchored, nevertheless, by the pole in the center of the canvas.
More than a glimpse at a moment in the life of workaday London, the painting is a meticulous study in textures, colors, and shapes. Ginner contrasts the lyrical volumes of the heaps of rounded, brightly colored fruit with the strict linearity of the more-or-less monochromatic paving stones and sidewalk. His heavily outlined figures seem fixed in place, each standing immobile, in its own spot, remote from the next. He shows the women from all views: back, profile, and front, each exhibited in turn from left to right. The forms and drapery of their heavy winter dresses and coats, the abstracted features of their faces, and their stiff gestures-especially those of the woman and child at the right, whose poses are nearly identical-are highly sculptural. In its rigidity the scene appears carefully choreographed; it is reminiscent of that frozen instant in the theater after the lights and curtain come up but before the actors move. Through his use of patterns and piled-up forms Ginner constructs a decorative frieze-like composition, one in which any sightline past the scene into the distance remains immutably blocked.
His tight-knit composition forces the viewer to revel in the visual splendor of his technique. In its insistence on form and on the plasticity of the paint, the image is highly self-conscious. Thickly applied in uniform meticulous strokes, the paint becomes an integral part of the composition; it traces Ginner's hand and eye, underlining the fact that this is not a simple, mimetic transcription of the market at King's Cross, but a pictorial rendering of the artist's individual vision of that scene. His technique is busy and robust, like his subject matter, suggesting a sincere, down-to-earth engagement with life's hustle and bustle.
His approach to his urban subjects owes much to the stylistic philosophy, called "Neo-Realism," that he and Harold Gilman developed in the early 1910s. In the manifesto on that subject (which they used as the introduction to their two-man show at Goupil's in 1914), Ginner explained:
[Neo-Realism] must interpret that which…ought to lie nearest our hearts, i. e., Life in all its effects, moods and developments. Each age has its landscape, its atmosphere, its cities, its people. Realism, loving Life, Loving its Age, interprets its Epoch by extracting from it the very essence of all it contains…according to the individual temperament…Neo-Realism must be a deliberate and objective transposition of the object under observation, which has for certain specific reasons appealed to the artist's ideal or mood, for self-expression. [1]

[1] Arts Council of Great Britain, 8.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 180, no. 74, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)