Unable to pay his usual visit to France because of the war, Walter Sickert spent the summer of 1916 in Chagford, Devon – a small village in north Dartmoor, sixteen miles south west of Exeter. He made a handful of works whilst staying. This small panel painting is an oil study, made in preparation for a work of the same title. Having formulated the composition and the colour scheme in this panel, he went on to add a low-lying structure and climbing flowers at the left-hand side. Executed in oil on canvas, the finished painting was bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by Lillian Browse in 2007 (fig. 1).

Sickert had an ingenious understanding of light and shadow and manipulated them to great artistic effect. The composition of Chagford Churchyard is focused on a contrast between tree-shaded tombstones in the mid-ground and the sun-drenched Devon landscape in the distance. Against the bright colours of the scenery and the flowers, the crucifix tombstone looms forward from the picture plane and becomes a striking presence. Aside from this central contrast of light and shade, the painting is embellished with substantial pointilliste touches of bright colour; the cluster of red marks around the tombstone are probably poppies.

Aside from Chagford Churchyard, which he depicted in a total of three oils on canvas, four panels and at least four drawings, Sickert made other paintings of his Devon surroundings. The corner shop, the fields near the church, the bridge and a cottage also featured in small-scale paintings of 1916. His paintings of the churchyard are his most distinctive works from that summer, however. The iconography of headstones key into events of the day, registering the solemn fact of war-time casualties. It isn’t known how closely Sickert followed the unfolding atrocities of the Great War at this time; in any case, his Devon pictures provide a bucolic contrast to the devastation of the trenches.