Walter Sickert
The Camden Town painter is renowned for portraying a darker side of life, yet behind the salacious subjects lies an artist on a simple quest to paint with honesty, says STEVE PILL
One of Walter Sickert’s most celebrated paintings is titled simply Ennui – the French word for “boredom”. Everything about the work exudes a suitably apathetic atmosphere, from the dulled lack of tonal range and reliance on muted earth colours, through to the mundane domestic setting and unexpectedly large size – viewed in reproduction, one might presume this to be a small, intimate work yet it measures more than a metre and a half high, a further suggestion that this mood could, like the grey walls, go on indefinitely.
Nevertheless, nothing about this modestly captivating painting appears excessive or unnecessary. Every element is carefully considered. A glass sits on the table, the water line just below the halfway mark, decidedly more empty than full, while the taxidermy birds in the bell jar underline the sense of restricted freedoms.
Two figures at the same angle almost merge into one another. He is suited, reclining and contemplative as he smokes a cigar; she faces away, utterly bereft, leaning upon the dresser like her life depends upon it.
Something about this particular subject clearly chimed with the artist as he revisited it at least four more times over the next three or four years. This first version was painted in a room he took at 15 Fitzroy Street, using his school friend Hubby Hayes and Hubby's wife Marie as his models. A final, more successful version, now in the Ashmolean’s collection, added lurid wallpaper and was painted on a canvas a quarter the size, as if those walls were encroaching on the couple. That series says much about the artist’s compulsive nature and his ability to turn over a subject, fine tuning a composition until every ounce of meaning is wrung from the core elements. It challenges the notion that the painter was simply interested in spurious subjects and not the refinement of his art.
Much is also made of Sickert’s eccentricities and his outsider status, yet he enjoyed a relatively privileged start to his art career. Walter Richard Sickert was born in Munich,
LEFT Nude Seated on a Couch, 1914, oil on canvas, 51x41cm
THIS IMAGE Ennui, c.1914, oil on canvas, 152x112cm
While Degas depicted elegant young dancers, Sickert’s early work showed a seedier side to late Victorian life
Germany on 31 May 1860, the eldest of six children. His mother Eleanor was the illegitimate daughter of a celebrated English astrologist, his father Oswald a Danish-German painter and illustrator, the family having settled in England in 1868 after Oswald’s work was recommended to the keeper of the National Gallery. Walter dabbled briefly in acting and a short stint at the Slade before leaving early to take up an apprenticeship at the London studio of painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
By 1883 the young apprentice was trusted with delivering Whistler’s masterpiece, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, to the Paris Salon – the prestigious annual exhibition at the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts – and it was here where he first encountered the work of Edgar Degas.
While Degas depicted elegant young dancers in soft pastels or vibrant French cafés filled with revelry, Sickert’s early work was already showing a seedier, less glamorous side to late Victorian life. He showed audiences braying over the balconies of music halls, prostitutes lounging on wrought-iron beds, and couples struggling to reconcile their differences. Above all, he prized truth over beauty; his paintings endure not because they are timeless, necessarily, but rather because they are tangible – the subjects close to home, the brushwork direct and alive. A new exhibition at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, the largest UK retrospective of his work for more than 30 years, feels as fresh as if it were painted yesterday. It collects together more than 100 paintings on loan, including Tate Britain’s Ennui, while also finally utilising the Walker’s vast collection of 348 of the artist’s drawings, the largest such in existence.
Drawings were key to Sickert’s practice, particularly since Degas famously advised him to rely upon them for his studio works in a bid to escape the “tyranny of nature”. Nevertheless, keen observation was at the heart of his process.
“Walter Richard Sickert was a radical painter, who was determined to capture society as he saw it – regardless of whether this ‘rawness’ offended his audiences,” says lead curator Charlotte Keenan McDonald. “He repeatedly reinvented himself, pushing his art in new and unexpected directions. He sought to combine a technical interest in painting with his conviction that art should reflect the modern world.”
The irony is of course that in wanting to show an accurate reflection of his times, Sickert was happy to fabricate a scene for his paintings. Friends played roles much as he had done in his brief spell as an actor, while prostitutes were employed to sit for him too. Polite Victorian sensibilities were already troubled enough by the idea of his domestic paintings shifting their setting from the parlour to the kitchen or bedroom, without this extra realism.
If we are less prudish about their occupation today, his depictions of women remain troubling. Obscured faces hinted both at anonymity and also a demeaning attitude to women, while showing nudes seen through doorways added to the voyeuristic tone. For the artist, however, his informal figurative works were reinventing classical ideals of the female form and, in his 1910 article, The Naked and the Nude, he claimed to be simply trying to “find fresh words and living thoughts for truths that are ever young”.
Sickert was happy to toy with this unseemly reputation. Having settled in Camden Town in North London, he was familiar with a number of gruesome murders that occurred on his doorstep. Showing a shrewd knack for self-promotion, he retrospectively renamed several paintings The Camden Town Murder to capitalise on public interest in the trial of a horrific murder of the prostitute Emily Dimmock in 1907.
An abiding rumour that Sickert was in fact the real Jack the Ripper has been fairly conclusively disproved many times, yet that hasn’t stopped some notable figures fanning the flames of this theory – not least Patricia Cornwell. The 100-millionselling crime novelist commissioned DNA research for her decisively-titled
An abiding rumour that Sickert was the real Jack the Ripper has been disproved many times
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, a 2002 non-fiction book in which she attempted to frame Sickert as the serial murderer.
Another great novelist was equally fascinated by Sickert, albeit in a much more positive light. In 1933, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay in which she openly discussed the artist’s work as if she were recounting a dinner-party conversation and praised his ability to sum up a character. “When he sits a man or woman down in front of him, he sees the whole of the life that has been lived to make that face,” she wrote. “Not in our time will anyone write a life as Sickert paints it.”
If Sickert’s own life reads like the plot of a classic novel, each chapter was fleshed out by a fascinating supporting cast of characters. In the run up to the First World War, he offered out his studio to a collective of forward-looking artists that became known as the Camden Town Group and included the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Augustus John and Lucien Pissarro, son of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro.
He married three times; his first wife Ellen was a writer, the second, Christine, an embroideress, who died in 1920. Her passing prompted a brief move to Dieppe in France where he frequented cafés and casinos, painting the inhabitants as he went. The artist spoke several languages and made regular excursions to continental Europe, painting the crumbling architecture of Venice in his same sombre style.
Sickert met his match with his third wife, the accomplished artist Thérèse Lessore, who he married in the summer of 1926, a week after his 66th birthday. She was 24 years his junior and helped him set up a studio system for producing work with assistants that was similar to the ateliers of the Renaissance greats.
While those later studio paintings never matched the power and drama of his earlier alla prima works, his influence lived on into the 20th century and beyond, seen in the work of everyone from Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon to Frank Auerbach and Gillian Ayres.
Sickert: A Life in Art runs until 27 February 2022 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk