Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert (May 31, 1860 in Munich (Germany) – January 22, 1942) was an English impressionist painter.

Related Topics:
May 31 - 1860 - January 22 - 1942 - English - Impressionist - Painter

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His father Oswald was Danish-German and his mother Eleanor was Anglo-Irish; Sickert was a cosmopolitan who favored ordinary people and urban scenes as his subject. He was the son and grandson of painters, but at first sought a career as an actor; he appeared in small parts in Sir Henry Irving's company, before taking up the study of art as assistant to James McNeill Whistler. He later went to Paris and studied with Edgar Degas.

Related Topics:
Henry Irving - James McNeill Whistler - Edgar Degas

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He became an impressionist painter, but one with strong intimations of modernism. Many of Sickert's early works were portrayals of scenes in London music halls, often depicted from complex and ambiguous points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the audience, perfomer and orchestra is often confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. Isolated rhetorical gestures seem to be reaching out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering out to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people was to become a regular feature of his art. Sickert also commonly emphasised the patterns of wallpaper and carvings in these buildings, creating abstract decorative arabesques, flattening the three-dimensional space. Many of these pictures connect the artificiality of art itself to the conventions of theatrical performance and painted backdrops. Such music hall and theatrical scenes are strongly influenced by Degas. Many of these works were exhibited at the New English Art Club, a group of French-influenced realist artists with which Sickert was associated. At this period Sickert spent much of his time in France, especially in Dieppe where his mistress, and possibly his illegitimate son, lived.

Related Topics:
Modernism - Music hall - New English Art Club - Dieppe

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Just before World War I he championed the avant-garde artists Lucien Pissarro, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. At the same time he set up, with other artists, the Camden Town Group of British painters, named from the district of London in which he lived. This group has been meeting informally since 1905, but was officially established in 1911. It was influenced by Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, but concentrated on scenes of often drab suburban life. Sickert himself said he preferred the kitchen to the drawing room as a scene for paintings. Sickert regularly portrayed figures placed ambiguously on the borderland between respectability and poverty.

Related Topics:
World War I - Lucien Pissarro - Jacob Epstein - Augustus John - Wyndham Lewis - Camden Town Group - London - 1905 - 1911 - Post-Impressionism - Expressionism

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In 1907 Sickert became interested in the "Camden town murder", the killing of a local prostitute. He painted several versions of a scene in which a heavy-set man sits in a despairing pose by a bed, while a plump naked woman lies on it. Sometimes he exhibited it with the title What shall we do for the rent? (implying that the man is sitting up worrying about debt while his wife sleeps), sometimes as The Camden Town murder (implying that the man has just killed the woman beside him). This play on multiple interpretations of the same scene was a development of the Victorian genre of the problem picture. These and other works were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range. Many other obese nudes were painted at this time, in which the fleshiness of the figures is connected to the thickness of the paint, devices that were later imitated by Lucien Freud.

Related Topics:
1907 - Problem picture - Lucien Freud

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Sickert's interest in Victorian narrative genres also influenced his best known work Ennui, in which a couple in a dingy interior gaze abstractedly into empty space,as though they can no longer communicate with eachother. In his later work Sickert adapted illustrations by John Gilbert, taking the scenes out of their context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligability partly dissolved. Sickert also used news photographs as sources in the same way in his late works of the 1930s.

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He is considered an eccentric but influential figure of the transition from impressionism to modernism, and as an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th centuty.

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One of Sickert's closest friends and supporters was newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, who accumulated the largest single collection of Sickert paintings in the world. This collection, with a private correspondence between Sickert and Beaverbook, is in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Related Topics:
Lord Beaverbrook - Beaverbrook Art Gallery - Fredericton, New Brunswick - Canada

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Sickert's sister was Helena Swanwick, a feminist and pacifist active in the women's suffrage movement.

Related Topics:
Helena Swanwick - Women's suffrage

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