The Bridge, Chagford is a bright, finely executed panel painting, which uses Sickert’s characteristic palette of green and purple. The scene is ingeniously composed of balanced planes. The eponymous bridge dominates the picture; viewed from the side, it is foreshortened and creates an irregular and visually arresting shape at the centre of the work. The upper register of the work shows a substantial, pitched-roof cottage painted yellow; a telegraph pole, interposed between the bridge and the cottage; a view of rolling countryside at the upper left-hand corner; and tree foliage at the upper right-hand corner. The midground is evoked in an acid hue of green, representing a field that slopes away from the cottage towards the riverbank. This relatively small area of the panel is used to suggest an extended stretch of ground, steeply foreshortened and flattened into a painterly surface, yet lively and suggestive of space. In the foreground at the bottom left-hand corner, a shrub on the nearside riverbank obscures the placid surface of the water. On the bridge itself, there is a sketchy outline of people passing through.

During the First World War, Sickert was unable to pay his usual extended summer vacation to France. Instead, he spent the summer of 1916 in the small Devon town of Chagford, and the summers of 1917 and 1918 in Bath. Chagford is in north Dartmoor, sixteen miles south west of Exeter, and Sickert spent his time there producing a varied body of landscapes in drawings, prints, and paintings on board and canvas. The Bridge, Chagford depicts a small stone-built structure with wide, shallow arches, which crosses the River Teign on the rural outskirts of the parish and a ten-minute walk from the centre of the town. The bridge itself and the cottage pictured in the background are still in situ today and are little changed from how they appeared in Sickert’s painting.

The panel is painted with clean, flat touches of the brush. In the summer of 1916, Sickert occasionally painted on panels without laying a ground. His intention was to allow slivers of the warm, unadorned wood of the support to grin through the interstices of the picture. In The Bridge, Chagford, the exposed panel variously indicates the atmospheric interaction of clear sky and fair-weather cloud. The visible woodgrain creates a counterpoint with the texture of the paint surface, enhancing the surface quality of the picture and enforcing the flat, mosaic-like quality of the artwork. The effect of exposed woodgrain was exploited in several other panels painted in Chagford, one of the most daring of which depicts the gable end of a farmhouse (fig. 1).

Only at certain times in his career did Sickert work in oil paint on panel. Writing in 1914, Sickert remembered that Degas in 1885 ‘came to see my sunlight pochades in the Rue Sygogne [in Dieppe] and commended the fact that they were "peint comme une porte" [painted like a door].’ The phrase ‘pochade’ refers to an oil study, often made from life and always using a small-scale wooden panel. The Bridge, Chagford is one such pochade. Sickert was overtly critical of painting directly from life and, though he made panel paintings from life under the influence of Whistler in the 1880s and 1890s, especially of Dieppe street scenes and seascapes, he later dispensed with them in his Camden Town period. Not until the mid-1910s did he again make sustained use of painting on small panels, doing so throughout his summer visit to Chagford, when he produced at least ten such works. These pictures resumed the immaculate flat-surfaced finish that Degas had admired decades earlier.

All of Sickert’s Chagford panels measured approximately 16 by 24 centimetres. None were prepared or stained with a ground. Unusually for Sickert, every one of these Chagford panels was signed by the artist. Over the next two years, when Sickert was working in Bath, he continued to make pochades and at that time started using a ground. In a letter to Nina Hamnett, Sickert described his working method for studies on panel made in Bath, part of which method he may have been using in Chagford:

"I have a spiffing stunt for small studies out of doors needing rapidity. A pochade box with a screw through it standing solid on a photographic tripod. I give the two wooden panels a wash of violet in watercolour i.e. stain them. Then trace my drawings on to them with commercial blue paper. Then I give the panel a coat of white hard varnish (what actors put their moustaches on with) et allez [and go]!"

Hamnett herself was in Bath with Sickert in 1918 and described how ‘we would go out and I would watch him paint sketches of the river and Pulteney Bridge’. These ‘sketches’ were presumably made on panel, and Wendy Baron has recorded four such panels relating to Pulteney Bridge alone.

This panel painting of The Bridge, Chagford is closely related to a squared-up drawing of the same subject (fig. 2). The drawing was likely transferred to the panel, though Sickert may have painted the panel from nature using a pochade box and tripod as described above; this would explain the brilliant colouring and bold, cursory execution of the painting. The related drawing is inscribed ‘Chagford’ and confirms that The Bridge, Chagford is indeed from Sickert’s summer visit to Devon in 1916. The painting matches the drawing in almost every detail: the greenhouse in the cottage garden; the coursing of the bridge’s stonework; the telegraph pole beyond the bridge; the relation of lights and darks in the foliage beyond the cottage; and so on. The drawing is precisely the same height as the panel, but one-and-a-half inches wider than it. This accounts for the panel cropping out the less compositionally significant elements on the left-hand side of the drawing. The drawing is richly detailed and focuses attention on aspects of the subject that are only intimated in the painting; four iron anchor plates on the side of the bridge, for instance, are plainly delineated in the drawing while in the painting they appear less defined.

Aside from this panel painting of The Bridge, Chagford, Baron records in her catalogue of Sickert’s work one other picture depicting this subject. This larger painting was made in oil on canvas, and presumably used the same preparatory drawing.