Walter Sickert

When war broke out in 1914, Sickert was forced to abandon his annual summer holiday in Dieppe and return to London. Back at home he was concerned for the welfare of the town and its kinsmen. ‘My crisant [screaming] personal terror is for my dear Dieppe’, he wrote in autumn that year. Quai Duquesne, Dieppe was one of the etchings that Sickert made for the Carfax Gallery to sell in 1915, although the print was never published. It resurrected the subject of a painting called Une Dieppoise [Baron 2006, no. 118.4], which he made when a resident of the town more than ten years earlier. It depicts a woman at dawn fetching a pail of water from a portside pump. Quai Duquesne and the town appear across the water. Light and shadow in the print are registered entirely by gradations of vertical hatching, and the density of hatching is varied to create discrete zones in the foreground, the midground and the sky. As Sickert wrote to Ethel Sands in October 1915, he intended to ‘elaborate’ the scene ‘to the utmost pitch of minute tone’; ‘one must do a few complete tone plates […] to show one can […] and for an undisputed reputation in the British Museum’. There are only two impressions known to exist of this print in the second state; the other impression is owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.