Sickert: Love, Death & Ennui: The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection

Piano Nobile is delighted to present The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Walter Sickert. It is the most significant collection of Sickert’s work to become available on the market for twenty years. The Lucases were omnivorous collectors whose interests ranged from Attic pottery and Etruscan art to contemporary painting. But it was their abiding interest in twentieth-century British art that led them to form a wide-ranging, scholarly collection of work by Sickert. It was assembled with great care over a long period and came to include the most famous of all Sickert’s compositions, Ennui, which the artist realised in five different paintings. 

Sickert was one of the most original and provocative printmakers of his generation. At the heart of the Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection is a large group of prints that includes important examples from every period of Sickert’s career as a printmaker. Ever restless to experiment, he mastered a variety of media—lithography, soft- and hard-ground etching, engraving—and deployed them in unexpected combinations. He explored different papers and inks, and reworked his plates with such frequency that certain works were printed in ten different states, some of which exist in unique impressions. The Lucas collection includes multiple impressions and different states of particular prints and provides a rich sense of the haphazard way that Sickert developed his plates.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication. It follows Piano Nobile’s previous exhibition Sickert: The Theatre of Life, which was held in 2021 and curated with Richard Shone.