SICKERT, Walter Richard

(b. 1860 München, d. 1942 Bathampton)

English painter, printmaker, teacher and writer of German birth. Sickert was one of the most influential British artists of this century. He is often called a painter’s painter, appealing primarily to artists working in the figurative tradition; there are few British figurative painters of the 20th century whose development can be adequately discussed without reference to Sickert’s subject-matter or innovative techniques. He had a direct influence on the Camden Town Group and the Euston Road School, while his effect on Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin and Francis Bacon was less tangible.

Sickert was the son of Oswald Adalbert Sickert, a Danish-born German draftsman who settled in England in 1868. After several years working as an actor, in 1881 the younger Sickert attended the Slade School of Art in London. In 1882 he became an assistant to James McNeill Whistler, and the following year he met the French Impressionist Edgar Degas in Paris; these artists greatly influenced his work. In particular, Sickert was indebted to Degas for the ability to establish a situation merely through the attitudes of his figures. His first pictures of London music-hall interiors, which became one of his most typical subjects, appeared in 1888 at the New English Art Club. Such works helped introduce Impressionism’s subject matter of everyday life to the British public. After making a living as a portrait painter throughout the 1890s, from 1898 to 1905 Sickert lived in Dieppe, France, and in Venice, often painting landscapes.

In 1905 Sickert returned to London, where he joined the painters Augustus John and Lucien Pissarro, the son of Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, in advocating advanced ideas in British painting. During the latter part of the decade he began to depict disturbing subject matter, such as a series of chilling, ambiguous works entitled Camden Town Murder. By 1911 Sickert became the leader of the Camden Town Group, an association of artists who advocated an unromanticized vision of the urban scene; the rough quality of the group’s aesthetic is apparent in paintings by Sickert such as Ennui (c. 1913). The group also organized exhibitions of French and British Impressionism and Post-Impressionism that exposed the British public to important developments in European avant-garde art.

From the mid-1920s to the end of his life, Sickert lived in a variety of locales, including Dieppe and, in England, Bath and Kent. In his later work he increasingly used photographs, rather than live models, as the basis for his work. He also occasionally wrote art criticism for the leading journals of the day.

Sickert’s active career as an artist lasted for nearly 60 years. His output was vast. He may be judged equally as the last of the Victorian painters and as a major precursor of significant international developments in later 20th-century art, especially in his photo-based paintings.

Bathers at Dieppe

Viewed across the entire spectrum of his work, Sickert must be regarded as one of the most gifted painters of his age. The music-hall pictures, the paintings executed in Dieppe and in Venice constitute the three major thematic groups in his art.

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Lion Comique

Whistler’s followers included Theodore Roussel, Paul Maitland, Walter Richard Sickert and the young Wilson Steer - that is, the artists widely considered the leading British Impressionists. With Sidney Starr they split off from the New English Art Club. This sub-group used the label London Impressionists. The driving force was Sickert who outlined the task facing British Impressionism: to record the magic and poesy that lay all around in everyday life. London, the great metropolis, provided all the stimulating subject-matter that was necessary.

The concentration on London subject-matter was apparent in the work of Sickert, Starr, Roussel and the latter’s pupil Maitland. Urban problems resulting from 19th-century expansion in the cities - such as unemployment, poverty, child labour, alcoholism and prostitution - were almost totally absent from this art. The city was being viewed as a predominantly middle-class thing.

The music-hall pictures occupy a central position in Sickert’s oeuvre. They are skilful, effective exercises in using the contrast between the bright stage and dark auditorium. Like Degas, Sickert worked in the studio from preliminary studies. One of the first of the music-hall pictures was Lion Comique.

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