 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) |
|
English painter, art critic, and one of the persons suggested as Jack the Ripper. Walter Sickert was a dominant figure in 19th-century British Impressionism, but not a typical Impressionist – for much of his career he painted in a shadowy naturalistic way. Sickert's most famous works include the Camden Town paintings, which present the grim, seedy side of urban life. A number of important galleries, such as the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Museum of London, Tate Gallery, and J. Paul Getty Museum, have examples of his work. "Ages ago we left the forest and went into the world, and the eye shrivelled and the heart grew, and the liver and the intestines and the tongue and the hands and the feet. Sickert's show proves the truth of that soon enough. Look at his portraits: Charles Bradlaugh at the Bar of the House of Commons; the Right Honourable Winston Churchill, M.P.; Rear-Admiral Lumsden, C.I.E., C.V.O.; and Dr. Cobbledick. These gentlemen are by no means simple flowers. In front of Sickert's portraits of them we are reminded of all that we have done with all our organs since we left the jungle." (Walter Sickert: A Conversation by Virginia Woolf, London: Hogarth Press, 1934) Walter Richard Sickert was born in Munich into a Danish-German
family. His father, Oswald Adalbert Sickert, was an artist. With others
he contributed to the satiric magazine Die fliegenden Blätter
and created his own work at the same time. Sickert's mother, Eleanor
Louisa Moravia, was English by birth. Family music had an important
place: Eleanor sang and Oswald accompanied with piano. Beethoven and
Schuman were favorites. On account of the money she
received from one of her relatives, she was in practice the financial
mainstay of the family. Sickert's sister, Helena, became later a
champion of women's rights and published her memoirs in 1935. "Walter was always prodigiously energetic," she said. (I Have Been Young by H.M. Swanwick, with an introduction by Lord Ponsonby, London: Victor Gollancz, 1935, p. 60) In 1868 the family moved to London. Later he told the writer Virginia Woolf that he went to Reading, to a school kept by a drunken old woman, who beat a boy who had broken his arm. "And we thirty little wretches lay there cowed." Sickert attended University College School, Bayswater Collegiate School, and Kings College School. He had shown early artistic talent, but he first worked unsuccessfully as an actor, and then studied painting under Alphonse Legros at the Slade School, London. For a while he was James McNeill Whistler's assistant, and painted with him in 1884 in Cornwall. Sickert's early works were signed "pupil of Whistler." Sickert, like Oscar Wilde, William Morris and Bernard Shaw, was a friend of Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinski, better known as Stepnyak, a Russian revolutionary who had assassinated the head of Russian secret police and escaped to London. In Paris Sickert worked with Edgar Degas. Sickert lived in Dieppe and spent some time in Venice. When Wilde was released from prison, he fled the ostracism of London for France, where he met Sickert and Aubrey Beardsley in Dieppe, then full of artists. They, however, were not happy to see him. In 1905 Sickert returned to London, where he again started to produce sketches of music halls and their audiences. Stage scenes were also one of Degas' favorite subjects, but whereas his work had considerable erotic quality, Sickert's paintings were often full of undefined psychological tensions. Attitudes towards sexuality in Victorian England were far from liberal; and Sickert was secretive in many ways about his personal life. His nudes, painted without apparent sexual interest, were lower class women in cheap rooms. "Compositions consisting solely of nudes are usually (I have not forgotten certain exceptional flights of genius, such as the Rubens, in Munich, of the Descent into Hell) not only repellent," Sickert said in 1910, "but slightly absurd. Even the picture or two (I think there are two) of the master Ingres, which is a conglomeration of nudes, has something absurd and repellent, a suggestion of a dish of macaroni, something wriggling and distasteful." The name of one of his paintings, La Hollandaise (1905-06), was probably derived from one of Balzac's characters in Gobseck, a prostitute nicknamed "la belle Hollandaise." In 1885 Sickert married Ellen Melicent Ashburner Cobden, the daughter of the influential Liberal politician Richard Cobden. Born in 1848, she was much older that Sickert. The marriage was childless, and apparently unhappy. According to some sources, Sickert had an affair with an attractive artist's model named Annie Crook, who gave birth to Joseph "Hobo" Sickert. Sickert spent much of his time away from home, afraid that his infidelity would be made public. Officially Ellen divorced him in 1899. At that time Sickert lived in France and suffered from paranoia. In 1911 he married Christine Drummond Angus, his student, who was eighteen years his junior. She died in 1920. Sickert had studios in the East End, a working-class section of London, where between August and November 1888 five prostitutes were murdered. In 1909, Sickert produced a series of paintings, known as the Camden Town Murders, which were based on these killings. The killer was given the nickname "Jack the Ripper." It came from the flow of letters, signed "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper." One of Sickert's works was named "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom" which he painted in 1908. This kind of subject matter was unusual for an Impressionist painter, but not for an Expressionist. In his own aesthetic theory of Impressionism, Sickert linked
in 1899 his program to Edgar Allan Poe, who
was known for such horror stories as 'The Murders at the Rue Morgue.'
Sickert wrote in an unsigned preface to the London Impressionists'
exhibition held at the Goupil Gallery, that Impressionism "accepts, as the
aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts the be the sole
legitimate province of the poem, beauty." Sickert continued, that it is
"strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and
complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a
persistent effort to render the magic and poetry which they daily see
around them." The catalogue's preface was much influenced by Whistler's 'Ten
O'Clock Lecture' on art delivered in 1885. "And when the evening mist
clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor
buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become
campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole
city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us . . . " (Mr. Whistler's "Ten O'Clock," London: Chatto and Windus, 1888, p. 15) However, instead of actually examining the "magic and
poetry" of London, Sickert's work in general showed more dispassionate attention to activities of the shabby side of the
town. In this he followed Whistler, who made nocturnes and was
interested in places at night. After Sickert returned to London, his studio become the center of a loose association of young artists, which, at Sickert's suggestion, called themselves the Camden Town Group. The group consisted of sixteen artists, most in their thirties. Lucien Pisarro was among the oldest members: he was forty-eight; and Wyndham Lewis, who went off in his own direction, was born in 1882. The group held three exhibitions in 1911 and 1912 at the Carfax Gallery. They were not so much interested in developing color theories as to capture fleeting moments of life in murky, urban surroundings. Sickert himself used Impressionist methods, but it was not until the late 1920s that his sombre colors and tones drastically lightened. The countryside had no appeal for him. His dark, heavy style was widely imitated in British art schools well into the 1950s. Between 1908 and 1910 Sickert taught at Westminster Institute. Later he ran the private school Rowlandson House and other schools. Enid Bagnold, one of his female students, later said that "We were all enslaved . . . The day glittered because of him." (Walter Sickert: A Life by Matthew Sturgis, London: Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 409) Wendy Baron, whose enthusiasm for Sickert was awakened by an exhibition arranged by Lillian Browne in 1957, described Sickert as "astoundingly handsome, although in later life he often disguised his good looks behind an unkempt beard and a scruffy assortment of old clothes. . . . Sometimes he was a recluse, sometimes an extrovert. Few painters have been as articulate as Sickert." (Sickert: Paintings and Drawings by Wendy Baron, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 1) In
1920-22 Sickert lived in Dieppe. His third wife, whom he
married in 1926, was the painter Thérèse Lessore. With her he lived in
Islington. In 1934 he took a studio at 10 Cecil Square, Margate; he
also had a house near Margate. Some years later he moved to
Bathhampton, Bath,
where he painted scenes – not necessarily on the spot – and
made a series of pictures based on photographs or Victorian magazine
illustrations. Sickert defended the use of photographic material by
referring to such precedents as Millet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. One of Sickert's most famous late paintings, the
portrait of Edward VIII stepping from a car, was based also on a news
photograph, taken by a freelance photographer by Harold J. Clements.
The Kings is dressed in the uniform of the Welsh Guards, holding a
bearskin in front of him. On his left arm, he wears a mourning band for
his late father, King George V. From 1924 Sickert was an associate of the Royal
Academy. In
1934 he become a member, but resigned in 1935. An old friend of
Clementine's family,
he met briefly Winston Churchill,
a talented amateur painter, who
invited him to Chartwell to give advice on technique. Sickert taught
him the advantage of painting from photographs. "He is really giving me
a new lease of life as a painter," Churchill said. In 1938
Sickert received an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Reading;
he also
had an honorary LL D from the University of Manchester. Walter Sickert
died in relative poverty on January 23, 1942, in Bathampton. His first
posthumous exhibition was organized by Lillian Browse in 1943. Often Sickert's people outdoors or in dark rooms were frozen in the middle of some everyday action. His friend, the art critic Clive Bell said that "Sickert frequented men and women of all kinds, not only pimps and prostitutes, fish-wives and scavengers, but the less picturesque classes too— shop-keepers, officers of the merchant marine, solicitors, country-court judges and politicians. He was amused by all sorts and conditions of men and in his way took an interest in them: but he did not love them. If he was not a Fascist, he, like everyone who has anything to do that requires fine thought, great skill and continuous effort, detested disorder." (Old Friends: Personal Recollections by Clive Bell, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957, pp. 23-24) "Did I tell you how Sickert is a great painter?" Virginia Woolf wrote in 1919 in a letter to Vanessa Bell. "In fact he's now my ideal painter, I should like to possess his works, for the purpose of describing them." (The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume II: 1912-1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, p. 331) Woolf, who met Sickert in 1923 and 1933, thought that Sickert's pictures could be classified as stories in their ability to stimulate and develop plots and dialogue. Woolf visited Sickert's retrospective show in 1933. Afterwards, they met at a dinner party. Woolf wrote in her diary: "S. is sunk & old till warmed with wine. He scarcely eats. At last he expanded, & sang a French song & kissed Nessa's hand—spontaneously; mine more formally. I think a difficult old man probably. But the ingrained artist." (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Four: 1931-1935, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, p. 193) Sickert did not have an overcoat although it was December and freezing cold outside. He told Woolf that he had always been a literary painter and she was the only person who had ever understood him. Sickert was a prolific and influential art critic and an eager
letter writer. He first began writing art criticism under a pseudomyn,
"St P" (for St Peter) in The Speaker. Sickert's views on art
were not always coherent and he had a talent for stimulating heated
arguments. Among his opponents was Ezra Pound who attacked him in the New
Age. Sickert's reviews appeared in New York Herald, Scots
Observer, Art Weekly, The Whirlwind and elsewhere.
Sickert also wrote several hundred letters to the press. He criticized
van Gogh – "I execrate his treatment of the instrument I love,
these strips of metallic paint that catch the light like so many dyed
straws" – and Cézanne, whom he considered immensely overrated. He
also criticized the technique of his former teacher, James Whistler.
Sickert's recollections of Degas are without malice; moreover, he did
not tolerate any criticism of Degas, whom he called "the lighthouse" of
his existence. Once his friend, Roger Fry, an influential critic and
also a painter, said: "It took Degas forty years to get rid of his
cleverness." Sickert replied: "And it will take you eighty years to get
it." (Sickert: The Painter and His Circle by Marjorie Lilly London: Elek, 1971, p. 139) The crime writer Patricia Cornwell has claimed that
Sickert become a serial killer, Jack the Ripper, after Whistler, whom
Sickert idolized, went on honeymoon with his new bride. "For Walter
Sickert to imagine Whistler in love and enjoying a sexual relationship
with a woman might well have been the catalyst that made Sickert one of
the most dangerous and confounding killers of all time. He began to act
out what he had scripted most of his life, not only in thought but in
boyhood sketches that depicted women being abducted, tied up, and
stabbed." (Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell, Waterville, Me.: Wheeler Publishing; Bath, England: Chivers Press, 2003, p. 18) According
to Cornwell, Sickert was born with a deformity of his penis. He
experienced in his childhood traumatic surgeries: an anal fistula had
opened up a
channel between the lower part of the rectum and the skin around the
anus. And moreover, Cornwell believes he was a psychopath, and
never stopped killing. Sickert's biographer Matthew Sturgis tells that
Sickert was brought to London by his father in 1865 to have an
operation for a fistula, but nothing supports Cornwell's claim that there was some sort of complication of the penis. (Sickert: A Life, p. 632) In addition, Cornwell examined systematically the murder scenes and forensic clues. One of the most interesting points is that several of the Jack the Ripper letters were written on similar watermarked paper, made by A Pirie & Sons, that Sickert used. But even if Sickert had sent some dubious letters (he wrote a lot of letters to newspapers), it does not prove that he actually was involved with the murders. And Sickert's humour was verbal; to play a sick practical joke would have been uncharacteristic of him. Portrait of a Killer received mixed reviews. Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist, dismissed it as "a sloppy book, insulting to both its target and its audience." (Dealing With the Work of a Fiend,' The New York Times, December 15, 2002) Jean Overton Fuller also has suggested in Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990), that the artist and Jack the Ripper were the same person. Except Queen Victoria, no other historical figure of that time period has inspired writers, filmmakers and artists more than this mysterious serial killer. In G.W. Pabst's classic silent film Pandora's Box (1928) Louise Brooks played Lulu and Gustav Diessl was Jack the Ripper. Alban Berg's unfinished opera in three acts, Lulu (1937), drew partly from the same material. The text was adapted from Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora. In Robert Bloch's much anthologized short story, 'Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper' (1943), the narrator is the famous killer. Several historical novels on the subject include Bloch's The Night of the Ripper (1984), Richard Gordon's The Private Life of Jack the Ripper (1980), and Pamela West's Your's Truly, Jack the Ripper (1987). Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1984) combined Arthur Conan Doyle's detective with the Ripper. For further reading: Walter Sickert: A Conversation by Virginia Woolf (1934); The Life and Opinions of William R. Sickert by Robert V. B. Emmons (1941); Sickert, ed. by Lillian Browse (1943); Sickert, edited by Anthony Bertram (1955); Sickert by Lilian Browse (1960); Sickert by John Rubinstein (1961); Sickert: The Painter and His Circle by Marjorie Lilly (1971); Sickert by Wendy Baron (1973); Sickert: A Biography by Denys Sutton (1976); Walter Sickert as Printmaker by Aimée Troyen (1979); Walter Sickert by Richard Shone (1988); Sickert and the Ripper Crimes by Jean Overton Fuller (1990); Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group by Maureen Connett (1992); Sickert: Paintings, edited by Wendy Baron and Richard Shone (1992); Walter Sickert: Drawings: Theory and Practice: Word and Image by Anna Gruetzner Robins (1996); The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper by Maxim Jakubowski (1999); Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell (2002); Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder in Focus by Anna Gruetzner Robins (2003); Walter Sickert by Matthew Sturgis (2003); Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes, edited by Barnaby Wright (2007); Sickert: The Theatre of Life, edited by Matthew Travers (2021); Sickert: la provocation et l'énigme by Delphine Lévy (2021) Selected works:
|
