Tiller Girls

Location

Country: USA
City: Washington DC
Place: British Embassy

This painting shows the Tiller Girls, a British dancing troupe, performing their famous ‘tap and kick’ routine in perfect unison, and in a straight line. The repeated stepping movement of the women across the painting gives an impression of movement, which is enhanced by the effect of dazzling, flashing spotlights, like a series of images on a reel of cinematic film. Christopher Nevinson had used effects of explosive movement and light to even more dramatic effect in his First World War paintings. This technique was not and was influenced in turn by Italian Futurist and English Vorticist artists with whom he associated shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. 

The Tiller Girls were a troupe of dancers founded in the 1890s by the Lancashire-born John Tiller (1854–1925). Tiller’s innovative idea of drilling the chorus line in theatrical productions with the same rigour as a corps de ballet, brought him fame and considerable financial rewards. By 1900 his reputation was growing fast and by the 1920s, lines of Tiller Girls were performing throughout Europe and America. After his death, his wife continued to keep the troupe going until the 1930s and their son continued the tradition. The name Tiller Girls is still used today by a dancing troupe in Blackpool. Tiller died in New York in 1925 and his body was brought back to London. On the special funeral train to Brookwood he was apparently accompanied by 50 Tiller Girls. There is some doubt as to whether this painting is dated 1925 or 1926, but Nevinson may have painted it as a memorial image to Tiller. He also made an etching of this scene.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, painter and printmaker, has been described as 'a vital and contentious figure, among the most important British artists of the twentieth century.' Nevinson studied art in London and then in Paris. In March 1914 he became a founding member of the London Group of artists, and in June of that year issued a Futurist manifesto, Vital English Art, with the Italian Futurist artist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. During the First World War, Nevinson served in Flanders and France as an ambulance driver and became a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. In March 1915 his first war paintings were shown at the London Group. In June and July of that year he exhibited as a Futurist at the Vorticist exhibition (Vorticism was a British derivation of Cubism and Futurism) and contributed to the second and last issue of the Vorticist magazine Blast. Nevinson's first solo show, primarily of war paintings, was held in September 1916 at the Leicester Galleries in London, and was a great success. That year he was 'invalided' out of the Army and appointed an Official War Artist in 1917. He became the first artist to draw from the air. In 1919 he visited Paris and New York. He was created Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur in 1938, and Associate of the Royal Academy in 1939. Suffering deep depression and breakdowns as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War, his health broke down due to overwork and he died in London in October 1946.

Places

Subjects

dance, stage, genre, Vorticism, woman, theatre interior

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889 - 1946)

Title

Tiller Girls

Date

1926

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 45.50 cm, width: 61.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Mayor Gallery, July 1968

Inscription

br: C. R. W. NEVINSON. 1926 [date indistinct]

GAC number

8177