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SICKERT
Love, Death & Ennui
The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection
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We are delighted to present for sale one of the finest collections of art by Walter Sickert in private hands. Of Sickert’s prints, besides the collections of the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum, it is unquestionably one of the most complete collections in both size and quality.
Herbert and Ann Lucas were remarkable collectors. Their interests ranged widely and encompassed everything from Attic pottery to the contemporary art of their day. When it came to Sickert, however, Herbert (known to all as Bill) was intent. He assembled a remarkable collection and we are delighted to show it here in its entirety.
This Viewing Room is divided into nine chapters, each of which contains pictures grouped together under the chapter theme. These can be explored via the links below. >
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Pupil of Whistler >
In 1882, Sickert went to help Whistler in his studio as a printing assistant. Mortimer Menpes considered himself and Sickert to be Whistler’s ‘only two genuine pupils’, and remembered a time when ‘we used to travel all round London painting nature from the top of hansom cabs’. According to his friend and biographer Robert Emmons, Sickert’s interest in etching ‘was first aroused by the example of his master […]. In his earliest plates, indeed, it is difficult to distinguish the chrysalis from the butterfly.’ He added that these early plates were ‘bitten and printed in Whistler’s studio’.
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The Music Hall >
Music hall was the pre-eminent metropolitan popular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its performers ranged from bawdy public-house turns to the early celebrities of Hollywood such as Charlie Chaplin. Sickert went to halls on London’s peripheries at Shoreditch, Canning Town, Camden Town, as well as those in the West End such as the Oxford on Oxford Street, the Empire in Leicester Square and the Middlesex (or ‘Old Mo’) in Drury Lane. ‘He came because he loved it, because it was moving with a colourful, romantic life of its own’, Emmons wrote. For long periods of Sickert’s career, beginning in 1884 or so, Sickert visited the music halls and there made drawings and etchings from life.
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Venice >
In 1895, writing home to his friend the painter Philip Wilson Steer, Sickert declared: ‘Venice is really first-rate for work.’ Notwithstanding the eminence of painted Venice, ranging through Canaletto, Whistler and Monet, all of whom Sickert admired, it was the rich character of the place itself that appealed to him above all. He found his own subjects but did not demure from treating famous motifs around the Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Basilica. He made five visits to the city in summer 1895, 1896, spring 1900, the first half of 1901, and 1903–1904. The final visit lasted about eight months.
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Dieppe >
Sickert lived in Dieppe between 1898 and 1905. The Lucases took a concerted interest in the extended, chaotic nature of Sickert’s creative process, and they often selected prints and drawings that belonged to a single line of pictorial development. Sickert worked La Rue Notre Dame, Dieppe more extensively than any other print in his career. The signature was reworked, figures were added, areas of shadow were elaborated, the contrejour effect of the buildings was deepened with aquatint, and so on. Harold Wright identified twelve states, but the researches of Ruth Bromberg show that the plate in fact went through no fewer than sixteen states.
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London Again >
In February 1905, Sickert visited London to attend the International Society’s Whistler memorial exhibition. But he quickly became ensconced in London society, attending lunch and dinner parties, and making new friends who included most notably Elsie Swinton. Sickert had planned to return to France after the Whistler exhibition, but as Matthew Sturgis suggests, ‘the onset of his new infatuation seems to have made him reconsider.’
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Granby Street >
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.
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Red Lion Square & Fitsroy Street >
In 1914, Sickert set up new studios in Red Lion Square, Holborn, first at number 24 and then next door at number 26. He installed a printing press at No. 26, which became a productive site for painting and etching war-related compositions. In August 1915, Sickert moved into ‘Whistler’s old studio’ at 8 Fitzroy Street. Whistler had taken the studio in March 1896, and Grant took over from Sickert in 1920; it was destroyed by bombing in 1940.
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Rue Aguado >
After the death of his wife Christine in October 1920, Sickert withdrew from Envermeu where they had lived together and settled for a time in Dieppe. At 22 rue Aguado, he made paintings, drawings and prints that clearly depict the same furnished room. It was filled by a bed with carved bedknobs and a large mirrored wardrobe (an armoire à glace), which was the departure point and a compositional lynchpin in several works.
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The Late Etchings >
Upon his return to London from Dieppe in 1922, Sickert did not make concerted efforts in etching, but nor did he entirely abandon print media. After establishing a commercial relationship with the dealers Colnaghi, who sold his prints on a sale or return basis, from 1925 he worked with the Leicester Galleries which both published and exhibited his prints. His last prints of 1928 and 1929 are marked by continued formal invention, especially in the use of ruler-drawn systems of hatching.
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Sickert | Love, Death & Ennui: The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection
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