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Artworks
Walter Sickert
Noctes Ambrosianæ, 1908, c.Etching and aquatint on wove paperPlate: 21.8 x 25.3 cm / 8 1/2 x 10 in
Sheet: 31.7 x 45 cm / 12 1/2 x 17 3/4 inThird state (of three); Edition 30 of 50Copyright The ArtistIn 1906 Sickert painted the gallery of the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane, full to bursting with a rapt audience [Baron 2006, no. 280]. He called the picture Noctes...In 1906 Sickert painted the gallery of the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane, full to bursting with a rapt audience [Baron 2006, no. 280]. He called the picture Noctes Ambrosianæ, which is erroneous Latin for ‘ambrosial nights’. It was the first music hall scene he made in London after returning from France the year before. This print derived from the painting of 1906. A closely related upright plate of the subject, The Old Mogul Tavern, Drury Lane [Bromberg 128], was dated 1908. Noctes Ambrosianæ was likely made around the same time. Both prints use the same composition and the upright plate is a crop that shows the left-hand side of this print. Noctes Ambrosianæ was printed at Rowlandson House in 1910 as an edition of fifty, while The Old Mogul Tavern, Drury Lane was published much later by the Leicester Galleries in 1929. Aquatint was used to suggest the crepuscular atmosphere in the theatre’s upper echelons, a technique that ‘mimicked the atmospheric effects of his paintings of the period’, as Wendy Baron has noted. This impression of Noctes Ambrosianæ was previously owned by Sir George Whistler, who served as Whistler’s solicitor.Provenance
Sir George Lewis
At Sotheby's, London, 26 Oct. 1995, lot 81
The Fine Art Society, London
The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection, Los Angeles, May 2000
Exhibitions
London, The Leicester Galleries, Etchings and Engravings by Walter Richard Sickert, Oct. 1941, cat. no. 25
London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Centenary Exhibition of Etchings & Drawings by W. R. Sickert, 15 March – 14 April 1960, cat. no. 156 ('2nd and published state')
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Walter Sickert as Printmaker, 21 Feb. – 15 April 1979, cat. no. 45London, The Fine Art Society, Walter Sickert: Paintings, Drawings & Prints, 8 May – 15 June 2000, cat. no. 11*
London, Piano Nobile, Sickert: Love, Death & Ennui. The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection, 26 Sept. – 19 Dec. 2025, no. 16*
Literature
J. Middleton Murry, 'The Etchings of Walter Sickert', Print Collector's Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Feb. 1923), pp. 39, 42, pl. 3 (illus.)
Robert Emmons, The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert, Faber & Faber, 1941, opp. p. 102 (illus.)
Aimée Troyen, Walter Sickert as Printmaker, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, 1979, cat. no. 45, pp. 32–33 (illus.)
Ruth Bromberg, Walter Sickert: Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, Yale University Press, 2000, cat. no. 129, pp. 122–125 (illus.)
Walter Sickert: Paintings, Drawings & Prints, exh. cat., The Fine Art Society, 2000, cat. no. 11, p. 16 (this impression illus.)*
Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, 2006, cat. no. 280.9, p. 331
Kate Aspinall, Luke Farey and Stuart Lucas, Sickert: Love, Death & Ennui. The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection, exh. cat., Piano Nobile, 2025, no. 16, pp. 44–45 (col. illus.)*2of 2