Walter Sickert

Between 1910 and 1914, Sickert made many two-figure genre scenes in Camden Town that are among his best-known work. Several including Ennui and Jack Ashore were studied from life in his room—a first-floor front—on the corner of Granby Street and the Hampstead Road. He referred to this address as Wellington House Academy after a school that operated from the premises in the early nineteenth century. Charles Dickens had been a day scholar there and based some of David Copperfield on his experiences at the school, which fired Sickert’s interest. A Passing Funeral depicts two coster girls, of whom the seated figure wears an American sailor hat. In 1923, Middleton Murry thought it ‘a little masterpiece’ into which Sickert ‘managed triumphantly to distil the very soul of the English “lower-class” woman.’ A related drawing suggests they are standing before a pair of double doors, which overlook the street below. Robert Emmons mentioned that the room in Granby Street had French windows, ‘which help to place some of the pictures’. Sickert inscribed this impression as a present to his friends Anna Hope (‘Nan’) Hudson and Ethel Sands (‘A.H. H. and E. S.’). The only other impression of the first state is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.