Walter Sickert

Not until his final working visit to Venice did Sickert, inspired partly by the rain, progress from architecture to the figure. In 1903–04, he painted several two-figure genre paintings (genrebilder as he described them) composed around a bed or sofa. In Caquetoëres, light enters the room dimly from the left. The figure on the left appears as a shadowy silhouette while the other woman’s heavily made-up face is a focal point of illumination. The interior is Sickert’s studio at 940 Calle dei Frati, which he first rented in 1896 and used on each return visit. ‘The room was at the top of the house, with a good light from its single window’, Emmons wrote.

The models have been identified by Wendy Baron as La Giuseppina, on the left, and her friend La Carolina dell’Acqua, on the right. Both models were sex workers, a pragmatic arrangement since ‘[t]here were no professional models in Venice’. La Giuseppina is distinguishable by her ‘sharp features and shock of black hair’, while La Carolina wears a tartan shawl that appears in two further paintings made during the same visit. The scrolling arm of the sofa is a feature in several other paintings made during Sickert’s last visit to Venice. Some of these, including Carolina [Baron 2006, no. 193] (fig. 1) and La Giuseppina [Baron 2006, no. 192.2] (fig. 2), depict lone figures. Others, such as Le Tose [Baron 2006, no. 214] (fig. 3), show conversation pieces in the manner of Caquetoëres.

During the final visit to Venice there was a significant development in Sickert’s ability to paint and characterise the human figure, both clothed and unclothed. He informed his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche: ‘I have gained a great deal of experience working every day from 9 to 4. I have learned many things.’ He was then chiefly involved in ‘study with the model’, and all his paintings and drawings were made from life; only later did he begin to transfer drawings to canvas. Several figure paintings he made in London in 1905, those of clothed women in darkened interiors, are strongly redolent of Venice.

‘Caquetoeres’ is an archaic Middle French word meaning ‘gossips’. Sickert lifted it from the Ballade des Femmes de Paris by the medieval poet François Villon, whose work he admired. The poem refers to women from Venice, Florence and many other places, all reckoned as good talkers, but the author asserts repeatedly that there’s no tongue like a Parisian one. A modern French glossary of Villon’s work gives the meaning of caquetoeres as caqueteuses (chatty) or bavardes (talkative). Wendy Baron previously suggested it was Venetian dialect for an Italian word, but she grasped its correct meaning nevertheless: chatterboxes. Among the ten paintings that Sickert exhibited at the Salon d’automne in 1906, Caquetoëres was one of five Venetian subjects.