Walter Sickert

La Belle Gâtée, or ‘the spoiled beauty’, depicts a man and a woman entangled on a bed. She is reclining across his lap, her crooked left arm supporting her head, while he sits upright with his head bowed. Their gazes lock together. The title derives from a sarcastic Norman phrase that Sickert acquired in Dieppe and later quoted in a letter of 1912: Boujou! T’es ma belle gâtée. Cause toujour (‘Hello! You’re my spoiled beauty. By all means continue talking…’). A related drawing was exhibited in 1911 with the title ‘Persuasion’ [Baron 2006, no. 352], which implies a seduction, notwithstanding the man’s vacant, mask-like visage. This plate was reworked three times, each state of which was apparently printed only once. This work is a unique proof of the final state, in which Sickert used aquatint to ‘paint’ patterns in the background redolent of wallpaper or textiles. He reserved special admiration for the technical mastery of aquatint and in 1915 praised Goya’s Por que fue sensible, which was ‘etched entirely by aquatint without the ingerence of line’, ‘practically a facsimile of a water colour’. Bromberg praised the technical control that Sickert demonstrated in this impression of La Belle Gâtée: ‘The dynamic highlighting was achieved by Sickert’s use of stopping-out varnish as though it were paint applied to canvas. It exemplifies his ability to exploit the painterly potential of aquatint.’ The lighter areas of patterning were achieved by ‘broad strokes of the brush’, which applied varnish to the plate and prevented aquatint from biting those areas.