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SICKERT : A LIFE IN ART
An exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18th
September, 2021 to 27th February, 2022
SICKERT : A LIFE IN ART
By Charlotte Keenan McDonald
National Museums Liverpool. 104 pages. £14.95. ISBN 978-1-9027-00632
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Walter Sickert was born in Munich in 1860. His father, a painter and
illustrator for a weekly satirical paper, was Danish, and his mother
was the daughter of an Irish dancer who worked on the London stage.
The family moved to England in 1868, “partly owing to the increasing
political and social tensions in Prussia”. He had no conventional
art training, but received “an informal arts education” through his
father and “the family’s artistic social network”, which included
Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.
It’s relevant, also, to point to Sickert’s early activities as an
actor. He had some success on the stage, but suddenly decided to
turn to painting. There is a suggestion that this may have been
brought about by his friendship with the American artist, James
Abbott McNeill Whistler. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art
in 1881, but didn’t stay long, disillusioned by the “formal teaching
and rigid hierarchies”, and then became an apprentice in Whistler’s
studio. Learning on the job suited him better. Years later, in 1907,
Sickert painted a self-portrait with the title, “The Juvenile Lead”,
which was a somewhat satirical look at his early days as an actor.
Sickert met Edgar Degas in 1883 and through him began to pick up
ideas from the Impressionists, though it would be wrong to suggest
that he can be easily slotted into that category. His work, almost
from the beginning, was far too original, and with its own colour
interests, to place him alongside the French painters, or even those
English artists who more-closely followed the Impressionist leanings
in relation to light and colour. “The Laundry Shop, Dieppe”, painted
in 1885, is darker in tone than most Impressionist works.
I think Sickert really began to come into his own when, in the
mid-1880s, he painted pictures set in the music halls. Some of the
resultant canvases are possibly among his best-known paintings. “The
Gallery of the Old Bedford”, with its working-class audience almost
hanging over the balcony, had me humming one of the most charming of
music-hall songs, “The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery”, as I stood
in front of it. In his own way Sickert was recording the music-hall
before it began to bring in more middle-class customers and toned
down the bawdiness and working-class participation that often marked
performances.
The music-hall section of the exhibition particularly delighted me,
but there is much to be gained from Sickert’s work as he painted in
Dieppe and Venice. Some people, expecting a lightness of touch about
the views of both places, might be disappointed with what they see.
Colour is there, but Sickert did not overplay it in the way that a
more-conventional painter might have done in order to create an
attractive picture. His darker colours refuted some Impressionist
ideas, and in fact Sickert was critical of Monet’s attempts to
record shifting arrangements of light and shade in, for example,
his Haystack series.
I have to admit that I was a little disappointed that the exhibition
didn’t devote much attention to Sickert’s involvements with the
artists of the Fitzroy Street, Camden Town, and London Groups.
Sickert’s presence was important to all of them. There are passing
references to some of the painters and, considering that he can be
seen as a key influence in their activities, more might have been
made of what they did. There are some examples of a number of women
painters who worked
alongside Sickert – Sylvia Gosse, Ethel Sands, Anna Hope Hudson, and
most of all Thérèse Lessore – and, to be fair, the catalogue for the
exhibition does mention Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, and one or two
others. Some examples of their work could have been useful. Sickert
was a firm believer in getting art out of the drawing-room and into
the kitchen. In other words, in portraying what might be dismissed
as the “ordinary” and not considered as suitable for painting.
Leaving that aside, it was good to see that quite a few of Lessore’s
works are on display. It’s noted that her “Brighter palette and
delicate brushwork were more in keeping with the style associated
with the Bloomsbury Group”.
She had links to it through her marriage to her first
husband, Bernard Adeney. Sickert is reputed to have commented that
Lessore, who married Sickert after his second wife died, “was the
first women who took no notice of what he said and did exactly as
she wanted”. But they appeared to have had a good, working
relationship, with Lessore’s contributions to his later work
(particularly the photo-based paintings) being considerable. It may
also have been a fact that she “completed works bearing Sickert’s
signature when, towards the end of his life, he was too infirm to
finish them”.
Sickert’s so-called Camden Town Nudes are often seen as among his
best-known works and have gained a degree of notoriety because of
stories about his supposed involvement in the Jack the Ripper saga.
He did create a canvas called, “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom”, and a
painting with the title, “The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We do
for the Rent?” but that was in 1908. The Ripper murders had had
taken place many years before in Whitechapel and not Camden Town.
Sickert’s painting had been based on newspaper reports of the 1908
murder of a prostitute.
There are a great many of Sickert’s drawings in the exhibition, the
Walker having a major collection, and the catalogue has a useful
guide to them by Keith Oliver: “The drawings range from quick
on-the-spot sketches made to capture a particular pose or detail, to
squared-up final studies for paintings, as well as drawings made as
art works in their own right”. Taken
together they support the paintings in the exhibition and indicate
how Sickert arrived at his final version of a scene or portrait.
Both the exhibition and the catalogue follow Sickert’s life in art
from his early days as a student to his final years when ill-health
sometimes prevented him from working, but at other times he often
used photographs as a basis for paintings. And he collaborated with
Lessore on some works. He did have a degree of popular success in
his late-years, though it’s noted that critics have occasionally
tended to overlook the paintings based on photography, primarily
because they’re not seen as original compositions. But they seem to
me to work in their way. And their inclusion in what is, in effect,
a study of Sickert’s career, completes a splendid exhibition. He had
a long, productive life, and died in 1942.
It should be noted that the catalogue is well-produced, has
informative texts, and is liberally illustrated.
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