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The Art of Walter Sickert

Transcript 
The Art of Walter Sickert, ‘The Father of Modern British Art’

The Main Gallery of The Lightbox is a large, rectangular space, 60 feet by 40 feet, or 19 by 8.7 metres, with a double height of 23 feet or 7 metres. The walls are painted white and there are paintings on all four walls. In the centre of the gallery there is a display case with various items belonging to Walter Sickert, such as his paint palette and letters.

Walter Sickert was a painter, etcher, writer and teacher, whose career lasted sixty years, spanning both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sickert can be seen as the last of the Victorian artists and a major precursor of Modern British Art. Born in Munich, Germany in 1860 to parents of Danish descent, Sickert emigrated with his family to London in 1868. Apart from brief spells in France and Italy, he remained in England for most of his working life up to his death in 1942.

From the late 1880s onwards Sickert was one of the first British artists to use subjects drawn from the popular music hall and theatre, from newspaper photographs and from unglamorous, often sordid, domestic life; thus he captured the world as seen by the man in the street. He turned his back on the sleek finish and more sugary subjects favoured by his British contemporaries and developed a sparse, understated style uniquely his own.

Sickert trained as an actor in the late 1870s before he decided to take up painting as a career and enrolled at the Slade School of Art in 1881. All his life he retained a love of the theatre in all its forms. Sickert was the first English painter to depict the music halls of Victorian London and for his efforts, he was attacked in the press for tackling such vulgar scenes.
The first painting we will look at is on the wall to the right of the gallery entrance.

Music Halls
The New Bedford was painted between 1915 and 1916 and is one of Sickert’s finest and most famous music hall pictures and illustrates an obsession that ran through his work for nearly thirty years.

It is a tall, narrow oil painting in a wide, dark wood frame. The overall dimensions are approximately 18” x 3’ (or 183cm x 72cm), but the frame itself is about 6” wide, with an ornate spiral and floral design. After The Bedford Music Hall burned down in 1896, The Bedford Palace of Varieties was reopened in 1899 and Sickert was drawn to its glittering, opulent architecture. The long, narrow shape of the painting reflects the narrow sliver of the theatre Sickert has chosen to show us, and emphasises the height of the theatre, with audience seated on the ground level at the bottom of the picture, taking us to people seated in the box in the centre and then, at the top of the picture, people right up in the balcony.

At the bottom of the picture people are seated in the front of the stalls, right up to the stage. The figures and faces are indistinctly painted, but the focus of their gaze is on the stage to the left at the bottom of the picture. We are only given a glimpse of the edge of the stage, but it is the brightest point of the painting, with a splash of yellow paint for the stage lights and some bright green, which could be plants or could be the ruffles of a dancer’s lifted skirt.

In the foreground right at the bottom of the picture, the head of one man in the audience takes the focus. He appears to be middle-aged with a moustache and is looking left towards the stage. His profile is lit by light spilling from the stage and his mouth is open as if he is singing along.

If we move up the picture, beyond the audience there is a short set of stairs, which would have led out of the auditorium, framed by heavy-looking red curtains. Directly above the stairs is a curved, bow-shaped box that juts out over them. The central focus of the picture is this box that overlooks the right of the stage, with red, velvet curtains framing a tall, arched opening. Three people are seated in the box and the woman seated on the left, nearest the stage, catches some of the light from the stage, which highlights the white trim around her large grey hat.

Two large, classical looking sculptures of nude women, stand on pillars built into the walls on either side of the box. Above the arch and at the top of the picture, is a sculpture of a cloaked figure, which dwarfs the people in the balcony to its right.

From this small section Sickert shows us that the whole interior of the theatre is lavishly decorated with ornate Victorian plasterwork. The overall colours Sickert uses are muted but warm, light browns or ochre, oranges and reds. As in most of Sickert’s work, the brush strokes are very obvious. He has added touches of light yellow paint in places, highlighting areas where the light from the stage has picked out the gilded plasterwork. The yellow has been applied more thickly in places, so that it catches the light, again giving it the appearance of gold.

This is one of Sickert’s finest music-hall paintings and marks the end of an obsession that had run through his work for nearly thirty years.
‘The New Bedford’ is on loan from Tate.

Nudes
Among Sickert’s contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the nude was prettified or mythologised to make the subject palatable. When Sickert’s paintings of nudes were first publicly exhibited they shocked because they were uncomfortably close to a notion of reality that was repellent to most viewers.

Female nudes in bedrooms are regarded as Sickert’s most significant contribution to British Art even though he actually painted a relatively small number. Around 1913 to 1914, Sickert moved from painting single female nudes, to two-figure compositions, where the nude or semi-nude woman is seen alongside a clothed male in situations ranging from threatening violence to inertia.

If we move a little further along this wall to the left, we come to an example of Sickert’s nude paintings, Jack Ashore, painted in 1912-1913.
Jack Ashore is a small oil painting approximately 40cm by 30cm, or 16inchs by 12inches. The painting is set in a thick ornamental gilt frame which is approximately 9cm or 3 inches wide. It is an interior scene and the main subject of this painting is a heavyset female nude who is sitting cross legged on a low bed. The bed runs diagonally across the image, with one corner on starting at the middle left of the canvas and the opposite corner ending at the bottom right of the canvas. Her figure in the centre of the painting takes up most of the canvas. The name of the woman in this painting was Marie Hayes. We can’t see Marie’s face as she is looking away from the viewer towards a figure who is in the left background of the painting. Marie is resting her left arm on the bed behind her, and propping up her chin with her bent right arm which is rested on top of her crossed left thigh. She has dark brown hair which appears to be tied up in a bun on the back of her head. Sickert has painted Marie to highlight her fleshy skin and large pendulous breasts. He has applied the paint in daubs and not smoothed them over. Her left thigh is especially prominent due to the way Sickert has painted the light falling on it. It is the brightest part of the painting and looks like there is a light shining on it.

The brushstrokes in this painting are sketchy in parts and paint is laid on the canvas in fat smudges and daubs. The paint is not evenly smoothed out. This makes some parts of the painting look textured, especially around her legs and torso. Parts of the unpainted canvas can still be seen in small areas around the painting and the texture of the canvas can be seen even on areas where Sickert has applied paint. The contours of her breasts are roughly outlined in brown. The colour palette for this painting is dark and earth toned.

The figure in the top left background corner of the painting appears to be clothed but we cannot make out any facial features. He appears to leaning with his arms crossed on a piece of furniture. This figure is of Hubby, a childhood friend of Sickert’s.

The title of the work, Jack Ashore, refers to Hubby, who ran off to sea and later fell on hard times. Marie Hayes, his wife, was not able to prevent Hubby from drinking and mixing with the criminal underworld. The subject of a clothed man beside a naked woman was incredibly shocking to pre-war audiences. The rough textural handling of paint is typical of Sickert’s highly original approach to oil painting, while the treatment of light and shade illustrates his debt to Edgar Degas.
Sickert studied the composition of this painting in several drawings. There is an example of one of these drawings, in pencil, to the left of this painting.
Jack Ashore is on loan from Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Wilson Gift through The Art Fund 2006.

Figures in Interiors
If we continue to move around the gallery to the left, we come to the long wall opposite the entrance. The paintings on this wall are examples of Sickert’s work painting figures in interiors.

Sickert painted portraits throughout his career from his earliest beginnings as an apprentice in Whistler’s studio in 1882. He had a strong gift for characterization which on occasion verged upon caricature. His time in London, between 1905 and 1914, is known as the Camden Town Period, when he developed the themes for which he is best known today. His pictures of ordinary men and women in the privacy of their homes, to which he often gave piquant and suggestive titles such as Off to the Pub, were considered sordid in his own day. During this period, he gathered around himself a group of younger artists who were inspired by similar subject matter and in 1911 they formed an exhibiting society which became known as the ‘Camden Town Group’.
Sickert developed a particular brand of ‘conversation piece’ in the form of two-figure groups. One series of picture depicts a nude woman together with a clothed man; Sickert gave the first of this series the title The Camden Town Murder, reflecting his passionate interest in criminal cases. His interest was so great, that he has been linked with Jack the Ripper.

Another, less dramatic series, shows clothed figure subjects evoking the boredom and petty conflicts of married life and if we move left, to the centre of this wall, we come to Sickert’s most famous work of this kind, Ennui, painted around 1914.

This is a large oil painting, approximately 4’ x 5’ (or 150cm x 180cm) in a very ornately carved frame. The title, ‘Ennui’, means ‘boredom’ in French. It shows a couple in a very ordinary Edwardian parlour or sitting room, who are obviously bored with each other and their marriage. It is Sickert’s most celebrated composition and is the largest finished painting of four known smaller versions of the subject. Sickert only shows us a small part of the room, with a wall on the left of the painting meeting the wall facing the viewer to form a corner just left of centre in the picture.  In the foreground at the bottom right of the picture there is part of a round wooden table and it is as if we are viewing the couple from across the table.

A man, probably in his fifties, with greying hair and moustache, sits beside the far side of the table, slightly to the left of centre in the picture. He is wearing a brown suit and is lounging back in an armed wooden chair, gazing off to the right. His right elbow rests on the arm of the chair and he is holding a cigar to his mouth with his right hand. A straight pint glass, half full of a clear liquid, sits on the table beside him and there is a box of matches to the right of the glass. The table is otherwise bare and the objects have been given a prominence by their foreground position.

Behind the man stands a woman, leaning on a wooden chest of drawers, which stands against the left hand wall, with its far end pushed into the corner of the room. Much of the woman’s lower half is obscured by the man’s body, but she is wearing a long black skirt with a shiny black belt, and a short-sleeved blue/grey blouse. Her dark hair appears to be in a bun. She is staring at the wall above the chest of drawers, looking to the left, in the opposite direction to the man. Her left elbow rests on the chest and her head is tilted to the right as if she is resting it on her right hand, which is out of view.

With a trick of perspective, it appears that the woman’s left arm is resting on the man’s head. Sickert has carefully painted the couple so that their positions almost mirror one another and that, although appearing in close physical proximity with the woman’s figure behind and above the man’s, they are obviously disconnected. Their poses imply listlessness and a lack of communication between them.

This message is further highlighted by a glass bell jar of stuffed birds sitting on top of the chest of drawers, to the left of the woman. At the top of the picture, on the wall facing us, there hangs a painting of what appears to be a semi-clad reclining woman. Sickert has given it a prominent position, on what is otherwise a bare wall, possibly symbolising another disconnect between the couple.

Below the painting on the wall and to the right, there is part of a pale-coloured marble fireplace surround and mantelpiece. All we can see is the left hand edge of it, the rest of the fireplace going off the right hand side of the picture. A decanter and wine goblet sit on the part of the mantelpiece that is in view.

The colour palette Sickert uses is muted browns, blues and greens; quite sombre and stark in feel. This may be a natural reflection of the gas and candle light used in houses at the time, but also evoking the drabness of much of ordinary daily life.
The brush strokes are obvious, but unlike much of Sickert’s work, the paint seems more carefully applied and less free. Sickert has shown shadow by outlining with a dark brown line of paint. This is most obvious around the back of the man’s head and his arm and around the woman’s bent elbow.

Sickert used his friend and assistant, Hubby as a model for the man and Hubby’s wife, Marie Hayes for the woman, both of whom modelled frequently for Sickert’s interior scenes.

Ennui is on loan from Tate.


Paintings from Photographs
If we now continue to move to our left we come to a series of paintings that Sickert made from photographs.


From the mid-1920s onwards, Sickert used photography extensively in his art, maintaining that the use of sitters in portraiture was obsolete and that photographs of the subject taken from different angles and in different lights would provide him with all the help he needed to obtain a perfect likeness.

Photographs also provided a springboard for Sickert’s imagination, stimulating his instinct for raw handling of paint and bold compositional design. His later theatre paintings, derived from press and publicity photographs, were closely focused portraits of the performers rather than panoramic views of the stage, which had been the subject of his earlier theatre pictures. Sometimes his imagination was caught by real-life events and if we move further left we come to the far wall of the gallery where the first painting is Miss Earhart’s Arrival.

This large oil painting was painted in 1932 and is approximately 180cm wide by 70 cm high (or 5’ by 2’6”), with a plain wooden frame about 10cms (or 4”) wide.

It shows the arrival of Amelia Earhart at Hanworth Aerodrome, near London, after her record breaking solo transatlantic flight. At this latter stage of his life, Sickert was regularly using photographs to work from, squaring up the photo and then painting a scaled up version on canvas. ‘Miss Earhart’s Arrival’ is painted from a photograph Sickert saw on the front cover of The Daily Sketch. Originally, Sickert left in some of the grid lines he had drawn, but after some criticism – and anxious to sell the work – Sickert hastily removed the picture from exhibition, painted out the lines and put it back on display.

The picture is mostly filled with the crowd of people who had come to greet Amelia Earhart. At the bottom of the picture, in the foreground are six male figures, seen from the waist up, with their backs to us.  They are standing next to each other in a line from the far left of the picture to the far right. They are all wearing hats and coats, and the furthest right figure is holding an open umbrella.

As we move up the painting, the figures are more indistinct as the crowd becomes thicker. Most of the crowd are looking at the landed plane, while Miss Earhart herself is a small figure on the far right half way up the canvas. Her face is in profile and the only figure with distinctly painted features. Her body is hidden by the crowd, but she appears to be wearing a dark coloured flying helmet. As happens today with a celebrity appearance, she is surrounded by people all hoping to catch a glimpse of her, with most missing her altogether.

To Miss Earhart’s right, in the top right corner, is an open umbrella and below it is the open umbrella previously mentioned, held by the far right foreground figure.

A small portion of sky is visible at the top left of the picture and below it, part of the plane. The plane’s tail, dark against the sky, begins half way up the left edge of the picture. It is joined to the top of the fuselage, which runs diagonally along the top of the picture to the top right. The dark wing, outlined in a line of white, also runs diagonally along the top of the picture, parallel with the fuselage. The rest of the plane is hidden by the crowd.

It was an extremely wet May day when Earhart arrived and Sickert shows the rain falling in right to left diagonal streaks of white paint. His unusual depiction of rain was criticised at the time; people said it was childlike, but Sickert was fascinated by Van Gogh’s paintings of horizontal rain and he is also accurately recreating the rain seen in the original Daily Sketch photograph.

The original photograph was in black and white, and Sickert has reflected this by using muted browns, blues and greys, as in much of his work. But strangely, he has picked out the central foreground figure by giving him a red coat, thus taking the focus even further away from the figure of Earhart.
This is a highly unusual painting, showing as it does a crowd of people and mostly their back views, where the central focus of the picture – Amelia Earhart – is a tiny figure that has to be searched for. Sickert was the first painter to have this very modern take on celebrity, illustrating the reality of a media crush that can occur around famous figures.

Sickert completed this picture in five days – from seeing the photograph to exhibition. It was almost as if he wanted to break a record as Amelia Earhart had.
Miss Earhart’s Arrival is on loan from Tate.
If we now move further round to the left, to the fourth wall of the gallery, we come to examples of Sickert’s City Scenes and English Landscapes.

 

City Scenes and English Landscapes

Following commercial failure as a portrait painter in England, Sickert focused his attention on portraying street scenes of two of his favourite places to visit, Dieppe and Venice. From the late 1890s onwards, Sickert developed a particular relationship with Dieppe. His huge production of Dieppe views earned Sickert a certain degree of notoriety and the nickname ‘The Canaletto of Dieppe’.

Sickert visited Venice several times between 1895 and 1904. Venice was a haven for civilised society and many painters flocked to the city. Sickert felt at home in this cosmopolitan environment.

If we move left to the centre of this wall, we come to St. Mark’s, Venice painted between 1895 and 96.
As a last effort to save their marriage, Sickert and his wife Ellen went to Venice in 1895. Although the marriage was not saved, Sickert discovered a Venice beyond the paintings and etchings of his master Whistler. He made numerous paintings of St Mark’s as a way of experimenting with technique and style. He is believed to have painted a few of them in his studio in London from photographs, including the painting we have in this exhibition. This painting is believed to be the largest, most elaborate painting of all the ones he made of St Mark’s Basilica.

St Mark’s Venice is a large oil painting approximately 91cm by 120cm, or 3ft by 4ft. It is set in a simple gilt frame which is about 13cm or 5” inches wide. The subject of the painting is the facade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The building dominates the image, filling more than half the canvas. The building has been set slightly off centre to the right of the painting and the corner of a smaller pink-beige building is visible on the left of the painting.  St Mark’s Basicilia and the area in front, the Piazza San Marco fill up the bottom half of the canvas. It looks very dark, as though it is in deep shadows, which is in contrast to the sky, which is brighter. The Basilica is painted in dark tones, browns, olive greens, greys and blacks. They sky is a flat pale blue-green-grey colour and there are no clouds. The painting has a shiny finish and a cracked surface, which is especially evident in the sky section of the painting.   

St Mark’s Basilica is one of the most famous buildings in Venice and is one of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture. Its opulent design was a reflection of Venetian wealth and power, from the 11th century.  The building was known by the nickname Chiesa d'Oro - Church of gold. The exterior of the basilica is divided into three levels, lower, upper, and the domes. Sickert has painted the lower and upper levels with dark toned paints. There are 5 archways, with one larger archway in the middle and two smaller archways to either side. This area is painted with dark paint and it is difficult to make out much detail. Sickert hints at imagery above the archways in the lunettes, semi-circular areas above the doors in the arches, by using dabs of coloured paint to indicate decorations.

 

The upper level is painted in lighter shades of brown than the lower level. It appears to be set back slightly from the lower level and there is a balcony which  runs along the length of the building. There are corresponding arches above the arches on the lower floor. These arches have ornamented and pointed tops. The lunettes in these arches have been painted with daubs of colour and highlighted with pale yellow paint which contrast with the darker surroundings to give the impression of gilt decoration. There are narrow towers between each of the arches.


There are 4 large domes on the top of the building, each one topped with a gold cross. 3 of the domes are clearly visible with the one in the middle being the largest. There is another dome behind the large one and the two smaller domes are on either side of the large dome.
In the foreground of the painting, in front of the building, there are three large flagpoles. They look almost as tall the height of the largest dome. There are green, red and white Italian flags hanging limply on each pole. The flags are also almost as tall as St Mark’s. There are gold ornaments on top of the flagpoles, but it is not clear from the painting what they are of.

Sickert hints at activity at ground level in front of the Basilica. Small blobs and daubs of paint are used to portray people walking around the Piazza San Marco.

The subtitle to this painting - pax tibi marce evangelista meus – meaning ‘Peace be unto you Mark, my evangelist’, is the motto of the city of Venice. We cannot see it in this painting but it is appears on a book, held by a winged lion, the symbol of St Mark, which is above the largest arch on the upper level of the Basilica.

This painting is on loan to The Lightbox from Tate. It was bequeathed by General Sir Ian Hamilton GCB, GCMG, DSO 1949

With the outbreak of WWI in 1914, visits to France were no longer possible and Sickert began to explore England. He kept to ‘picturesqe’ places frequented by painters – Chagford, a Devon beauty spot, Brighton and Bath.

 

If we move a little further to the left, the last painting on this wall is Brighton Pierrots, painted in 1915.

Brighton Pierrots is an oil painting, measuring 64cm by 72cm or 25 inches by 31 inches. It has an ornate gilt frame around it of approximately 20cm or 8 inches wide. It is regularly on exhibit at Tate Britain and there is another version of it in Oxford. It is one of Sickert’s most well-known works and changed hands for a quarter of a million dollars in 1993.

The scene is the sea-front in Brighton. The Pierrots perform on a bare wooden stage, erected on the beach. The only stage decoration are two tall poles, painted with strips of pink green and blue. We are looking at the scene from the side of the stage. Two performers in red suits and straw boaters are going through their routine to the audience on the right of the picture, who are seated in deckchairs. Beyond them to the right, is the sea wall, with the promenade above and houses facing the sea, stretching into the distance. It is the end of the day and the setting sun colours the sky a dusty pink. On the stage, there are footlights and there is a single white lamp above the stage. The two performers are painted with highlights on their hats and shoulders. A Pierrette dress in pink and brightly lit, is playing a piano at the rear of the stage. She looks out directly at us. A pierrot dressed in green sits at the back of the stage waiting his turn. He and the pianist are in traditional costumes with ruffles around the neck and conical shaped hats.
All is not well, the figures are arranged awkwardly.

The stage lights give the scene an acidy glow. There are very few people in the audience and one of them appears to have his head bandaged. It is the summer of 1915 and thousands have already lost their lives in the war – this may be emphasised by the empty deckchairs. It is a melancholic scene – end of the day and end of the season. The performers are just going through their routines, with no enthusiasm.

Above the stage, we see a single white bird, is it a seagull? Is it a dove?

Brighton Pierrots is on loan from Tate.