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Overview
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was an English painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century.
Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His work also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. The famous crime novelist, Patricia Cornwell, has in recent years unconvincingly tried to prove that Sickert was the notorious serial murderer Jack the Ripper.
Printmaking was an extremely important part of Sickert's oeuvre. A comprehensive understanding and appreciation of his achievements here has only relatively recently become possible through the research of Aimee Troyen and Ruth Bromberg. Sickert learned the craft of etching from his mentor, James McNeill Whistler and over his lifetime produced at least 226 prints.
Sickert enjoyed living it up without always haveing the cashflow to do so, and in 1914 his straitened financial circumstances led to him brokering a deal with Arthur Clifton of the Carfax Gallery, London. In exchange for a fixed maintenance of £200 per annum, the Carfax became Sickert's sole dealer and, in addition, the artist was commissioned to produce a series of sixteen etchings published exclusively by the gallery. With the exception of three prints, which were newly conceived designs created especially for the series, the Carfax etchings were based on his earlier paintings, drawings or earlier etchings. Te Papa owns two other works in the Carfax series, the famous Ennui (1961-0006-25) and The Lion of St Mark, Venice, 1951-0003-21).
This etching dates from Sickert's period in Dieppe, which was by all accounts a den of iniquity not to be found on puritanical British shores. It was a favourite haunt of Sickert and his predilection for demi-monde subjects, and he lived there permanently from 1896 to 1905, returning there as recently as 1914, the year before the print was published. The location is the café-cabaret Vernet, located on the Quai Henri IV. The etching depicts an unknown performer, a scrawny chanteuse in Victorian evening dress, arms outstretched and in a beseeching attitude, watched rather coyly by another woman in the background. Stylistically, its early modern hedonism, freedom and economy reflect Sickert's debt to such artists as his friend Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
See:
Maggie Gray, 'Sickert at the Seaside', Apollo, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sickert-seaside-dieppe-shaped-artists-work/
Wikipedia, 'Walter Sickert', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sickert
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art November 2018