Walter Sickert

Alongside Dieppe and Camden Town, Venice was a metropolis of outstanding artistic importance to Walter Sickert. It was during the unravelling of his first marriage to Ellen Cobden, a woman twelve years his senior, that he took to the continent and began a decade-long artistic relationship with the townscape of Venice. His first visit lasted for much of the period between May 1895 and September 1896, and he returned there frequently until 1905 when he settled in London. Between 1895 and 1905, his chief subject was the façade of St Mark’s Cathedral viewed from the Piazza, but he also painted Sta Maria del Salute, the Bridge of Sighs, and the former Scuole Grande di San Marco among many other places. Where many of Sickert’s Venetian paintings were executed back at home in his London studio, Study for Interior of St Mark’s, Venice was painted during the course of his first, highly productive visit to the city. The work relates specifically to a larger painting of the cathedral, Interior of St Mark’s, Venice (1895-6, Tate Collection), and to a small but undetermined number of other oil studies. These works were painted quickly and each one evokes with grandeur the church’s cavernous sense of space and its dimly lit, glimmering surfaces. Both this and the Tate Collection work depict the nave of the cathedral, looking east towards the high altar and including the pulpit attached to the north east pier of the crossing. Where the Tate work shows just one bay of the northern transept, however, this study looks diagonally across the nave and includes two bays. Similarly, though the Tate work represents the full height of the cathedral, including the apogee of the round-arched vaults above, this study has a more intimate sense of scale. The upper edge of the painting includes only the springing point of the vault. During his first stay in Venice, Sickert wrote a letter to his fellow painter Philip Wilson Steer in which he explained something of his habits and expressed a debt of gratitude to Steer. [...] the more experience I have, the more I find that the only things that seem to me to have a direct bearing on the practical purpose of painting my pictures are the things that I have learnt from you. To see the thing all at once. To work open and loose, freely, with a full brush and full colour. And to understand that when, with that full colour, the drawing has been got, the picture is done. The reference to working ‘freely, with a full brush and full colour’ is particularly relevant to this work. It was a defining feature of Sickert’s painting to reject the French Impressionists’ use of a pre-prepared white ground and working from light to dark (the assumption that all is light, thus requiring shadows to be built into the composition). Instead, he preferred to work on a dark sepia ground, as in this work, working quickly and here achieving yellow-gold highlights to indicate the shimmering mosaics on the upper walls of the church. Sickert’s depictions of Venice have been likened to those of J.M.W. Turner, who visited the city in 1819, 1833 and 1840, and the comparison is fully justified with reference to the ‘open and loose’ manner seen in this work. Sickert’s initial interest in St Mark’s as a subject was perhaps suggested by Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral, first exhibited in Paris the very same year this work was executed. However, it is also notable that, a few years earlier, John Singer Sargent had painted several closely comparable views of the interior at St Sofia (or Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, suggesting that these great domed churches of the Byzantine tradition were of general interest to trans-European artists like Sickert at this time. It is difficult to prove that Sickert had direct knowledge of Sargent’s paintings, yet the striking visual similarity of their pictures of St Mark’s and St Sofia – in terms of subject-matter, composition and execution – strongly suggest some awareness on Sickert’s part.