Walter Sickert Research Articles

Moving

The gallery space is full of static objects but also of movement. This is the space Vernon Lee sought to understand, theorizing and experimenting about how art moves. Lee is enlisted here to help look at movement in one of Walter Sickert’s music-hall paintings.

Review of Walter Sickert at Tate Britain

A review of the Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain, London, 28 April–18 September 2022, which will travel to the Petit Palais in Paris, 14 October 2022–29 January 2023.

Representations of Acoustic Discourse in The Yellow Book Volumes 1, 2, and 3: Walter Sickert's Music Hall Paintings

The images Aubrey Beardsley chose to have reproduced within the first, second, and third Volumes of The Yellow Book include; The Old Oxford Music Hall from Volume One (April 1894), The Old Bedford and Ada Lundberg from Volume Two (July 1894),Collins’ Music Hall, Islington, and The Lion Comique both from Volume Three (October 1894). By examining Sickert’s aforementioned reproductions chosen by Beardsley, this paper will utilize the politics of acoustic discourse and intermediality to investigate how Sickert's intermedial acoustic representations of Music Hall are reflective of the social, cultural and technological contentious modernist climate of the 1890s; and why the inclusion of the reproduced images within The Yellow Book are relevant to the magazines status as a total work of art. 

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE HAT, OR TO THE STORY OF ITS ABOLITION: CLAIR HUGHES’ BOOK «HATS»

This article reviews Clair Hughes' book «Hats» that was published by New Literary Review (in Russian: «Новое литературное обозрение») in 2019. The British researcher shows the history of hats through the prism of New European values, perceptions and etiquette. Hats act as the most important factor of democratization and emancipation. The author links hat fashion to the development of urban culture (boulevards, passages, cafes), entertainment culture (horse races, theaters, music halls, cinemas), youth subcultures (teddy boy, etc.). Clair Hughes pays close attention to the history of the cylinder and bowler hat, the Gainsborough hat and the Merry Widow hat, the cloche and the beret. The sources of the study are literary and pictorial works (by John Galsworthy, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Walter Sickert, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Sera, René Magritte) and illustrated magazines. Hats on stage, in movies and sports, hats as markers of social differences, famous modifiers (Lucille, Rebu, Dache) and iconic images in politics, show business (Churchill, Sinatra, Max Linder, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, Faye Dunaway, Gene Shrimpton) are the subject of Claire Hughes' book. The author ends her study of New European fashion with a history of the rejection of hats in post-war culture.

Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford

Minnie Cunningham (1870–1954) was a British music hall star and actress whose career spanned nearly forty years. Today she is primarily remembered through paintings made of her by the prominent British artist Walter Sickert (1860–1942) in the early 1890s. Despite her popularity, Cunningham has mostly been overlooked in music hall and theatre histories. Instead, the limited information that is available about her today comes to us primarily through art-history scholarship on Sickert. To fill this gap, this paper offers the first scholarly account of Cunningham by drawing together press notices, published interviews, and other artefacts from her long career. This introduction to Cunningham is framed by a discussion of the unevenness of the cultural transactions taking place between these artists – between the ‘higher’ arts practice of modern painting and the perceived ‘lower’ music hall. I consider how this imbalance played out at the time these artists worked and the impact this has had in the preservation (or lack thereof) of their artistic practices.

A circus in Islington: paintings by Thérèse Lessore

ABSTRACT In this paper I consider two nearly-forgotten artistic practices: that of British painter Thérèse Lessore (1884–1945) and the annual World’s Fair Circus held in Islington, London which she painted on several occasions in the 1920s and 30s. Despite Lessore’s significant output and the positive critical attention her artwork received during her lifetime, her career has been overshadowed by that of her second husband, the prominent British impressionist Walter Sickert. Both artists shared an interest in watching, drawing and painting popular entertainments, and even before they were married they frequently attended music halls, theatres and circuses together to gain inspiration for their work. From 1927 to 1934, the couple became regular attendees at the annual World’s Fair circus, which Lessore went on to depict in several paintings. Dating back to 1883, the World’s Fair, with its circus, animal menagerie, rides, and other novelties, brought the splendour of the summer fair into the Christmas period where it was sheltered from the winter elements by the glass and iron ceiling of the Royal Agricultural Hall. Despite its longevity and popularity, little has been written about the fair and the circuses it hosted. This paper begins the work of contextualising Lessore’s paintings and, in the process, recuperating a circus tradition that held significance for thousands of Londoners across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The Reflective Eye of Walter Sickert: Mirroring Male Victorian Dominance in the Era of the Emerging New Woman

The Reflective Eye of Walter Sickert: Mirroring Male Victorian Dominance in the Era of the Emerging New Woman

Sargentology – New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent

In 1910 Walter Sickert penned an article titled ‘Sargentolatry’ that addressed the fervour surrounding John Singer Sargent as an artist and tastemaker. Using the language of religious devotion, Sic...

The Honeymoon, A Novel

The Honeymoon, A Novel

The “Language of Painting”: Aesthetic Appreciation in Edwardian Art Criticism

In 1908 the artist-critic Walter Sickert (1860–1942) and the dealer-critic Robert Ross (1869–1918) engaged in a debate in the London art press and in their own private correspondence in which they discussed the idea of a “language of painting.” Using their debate as a case study, this article investigates how these writers posited different approaches to the practice of viewing art. I show how they used the notion of a “language of painting” as a basis for discussing critical authority, the nature of art appreciation, the role of beauty and pleasure, and the value of form and technique. In doing so, I reveal how they both adapted and departed from the ideas and rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century art writing, in order to consolidate their own critical authority and to present diversified ways of speaking about art attuned to new developments in the art world. In a wider sense, this article contributes to ongoing scholarly revaluation of the Edwardian period, which aims to recover a sense of the era’s innovation and heterogeneity.

Australian Artists Abroad

Australian Artists Abroad

Walter Sickert’s Miss Earhart’s Arrival: Collapsing Paint and Flight in a Topical Painting

This article considers Walter Sickert’s Miss Earhart’s Arrival (1932) in relation to contemporary discourses on heavier-than-air flight. I look at the negotiation of the future in paint, and through discourse analysis of its reception I conclude that Arrival questions the capacities of new technologies. By examining a cross-medium practice concerned with transcribing found press images of historic events, I situate this work in my larger argument that Sickert’s late work offers us perspectives on painting’s mediation of changing interwar notions of historical time, Utopia/dystopia, and the capacity of paint to critically engage technologies of memory and transit, both materially and temporally.

Seeing in Black‐and‐White: Incidents in Print Culture

In the late nineteenth century, debates around mechanization and printmaking raised questions about artistic authority and professional status for the expanding press. In 1877, the art critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public’ with his Nocturne in Black and Gold, and Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. Less than two decades after the Whistler v. Ruskin case, two further libelous attacks appeared in the press which appeared to have equally serious implications for artists’ careers. In the first, the artist Joseph Pennell penned an attack on the Royal Academician, Herbert Herkomer. In the second, Joseph Pennell was the target of an attack by the artist Walter Sickert. These two disputes centred on printmaking techniques and reproduction. Moreover, the press played a fundamental role in offering a public space for both textual and visual elements of the debate. Journals became the platform for the articulation of contemporary concerns about mechanical reproduction and the status of etching and lithography as fine arts.

Camden Town and Ashcan: Difference, Similarity and the ‘Anglo‐American’ in the Work of Walter Sickert and John Sloan

Art HistoryVolume 34, Issue 4 p. 774-795 Camden Town and Ashcan: Difference, Similarity and the ‘Anglo-American’ in the Work of Walter Sickert and John Sloan David Peters Corbett, David Peters CorbettSearch for more papers by this author David Peters Corbett, David Peters CorbettSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 August 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00846.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume34, Issue4Special Issue: Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USAEdited by David Peters Corbett and Sarah Monks September 2011Pages 774-795 RelatedInformation

The Pornometric Gospel: Wyndham Lewis, Walter Sickert and the History of the Nude

In this essay I argue that changes in technologies of reproduction precipitated a crisis in the status of the nude evident in the paintings of Walter Sickert and in Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr. I begin with a controversy between the English painters Walter Sickert and Wyndham Lewis in which each accuses the other of producing pornography, rather than art. I trace this conflict to the differing responses of these two figures to the changing place of the nude in English culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. I close by considering the suffragette Mary Richardson alongside Lewis and Sickert. Each of these figures, I contend, used violence as a way to respond to the nude and its position within the larger culture.

The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848-1914 (review)

Reviewed by: The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 Alison Syme (bio) David Peters Corbett. The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 Penn State University Press. xviii, 318. US $75.00, US $35.00 The World in Paint is an ambitious study that takes the standard formalist account of modernism to task for its geographical prejudices, and social history for its dismissal of purely visual concerns. Like Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer, David Peters Corbett's book dates the origins of modern visuality prior to the emergence of Manet and the Impressionists and, in the English context, prior to the 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' exhibition organized by Roger Fry in 1910. Identifying a 'new climate of possibility for the visual' in the 1840s in England, Corbett proposes a rethinking not only of the development of English modernism, but of modernism and the registration of modernity in painting more broadly. The book is divided into chapters on the Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism, the relationship of Oscar Wilde and his illustrator Charles Ricketts, Walter Sickert, and Vorticism. In each case study Corbett analyses how his artist-protagonists tried to negotiate the difficult questions of whether and how pigment could or should register modern experience. His discussion of Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray, for example, highlights the story's mockery of painting's truth-claims through its literalization of 'what it would really mean to impress experience directly onto the surface of a canvas.' Corbett explores a wealth of different painterly responses to these vexing questions, including scepticism about, repudiation of, or belief in 'the visual's access to the real.' In each instance, artists' concerns with pigment's potential for embodying, mediating, or disclaiming reality and modernity are examined in light of wider ongoing debates, such as the commodification of art, the experience of the modern city, and the different representational capacities of word and image. The larger problem the book addresses is 'how to connect historical circumstance with the physical surfaces of paintings.' Corbett's analyses of the ways pigment and facture were understood in each period he discusses are thoroughly researched and draw convincingly on a broad range of published and unpublished sources. His textual citations give a compelling sense of how paint, in all its materiality, was culturally perceived. Corbett, however, rarely treats the surfaces of specific paintings in much detail. The book, then, doesn't entirely fulfil its promise of returning to the visual. The exception to this is the chapter on Walter Sickert. Corbett's detailed treatment of Sickert's music-hall scenes, particularly Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Katie Lawrence, is stunning in its visual sensitivity and eloquent unfolding of the complexities of layers of fiction and reality, reference and self-reference in the work. Sickert's 'nuanced investigation into paint's adequacy as a vehicle' for describing modern [End Page 442] experience is also compellingly, if not as thoroughly, explored through the haunting Camden Town Murder paintings. The World in Paint is a welcome contribution to the history of English art, its complex weaving together of diverse agendas refreshing and admirable. If Corbett doesn't always provide as much formal analysis as one would like, he offers a rigorously historicized framework from which to begin. Alison Syme Alison Syme, Department of Fine Art, University of Toronto at Mississauga Copyright © 2007 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

The lost hospitals of St Luke's

Few Londoners know the whereabouts of St Luke's, yet for much of the 19th century it was home to seven leading hospitals. In 1865 you could have stood on City Road, near the famous Eagle Tavern, and been able to see six of them. But during the 20th century all but one were to vanish. And it was not just the hospitals that disappeared. The district of St Luke's itself became invisible. This may have been the result of a deliberate policy to ‘lose’ one of the poorest, most deprived areas of London. Like St Giles (another area that became invisible), much of the housing stock was dreadful, with overcrowded ‘rookeries’. In the 1850s St Lukes had 245 people per acre, more than St Giles (221), Clerkenwell (170), Westminster (71) or Islington (30). The local Medical Officer of Health described the houses as ‘typhus nests’. Both St Luke's and St Giles were ‘dealt with’ by wholesale redevelopment that left them almost unrecognizable, destroying as it did both their architectural heritage and any sense of community. Box 1 Highlights of the walk Site of the world's first chest hospital (Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest) Remains of one of London's largest workhouse infirmaries (Holborn & Finsbury Poor Law Union) Former home of the leading hospital for bowel disease in the UK (St Mark's Hospital) Site of the earliest voluntary hospital in London (French Huguenot Hospital) One of the leading ophthalmic hospitals in the world (Moorfields Eye Hospital) One of the last surviving public baths and washhouse in London (Ironmonger Row) Site of one of the most spectacular buildings in 19th century London (St Luke's Hospital) Box 2 St Mark's Hospital for Cancer, Fistula &c The instigator, Frederick Salmon, was an ambitious surgeon whose progress and advancement had been obstructed by medical nepotism and corruption. In 1835 he opened what became known as the ‘Fistula Infirmary’ in Aldersgate Street. Many of his subscribers had themselves suffered from lower bowel problems (a common problem at the time given people's diet), including William Copeland, Lord Mayor of London; Charles Dickens, who suffered from anal fistula; and Lord Iveagh of the Guinness brewing empire. By 1838 the infirmary needed more space. It first moved to Charterhouse Square and then in 1854 to a fine new, three storey, Italianate building designed by John Wallen (Figure 2). It had 25 beds for inpatients together with outpatient facilities. One to benefit was the artist, Walter Sickert, whose treatment at St Mark's has been used as evidence that he suffered from an anal fistula and not, as those who believe he was Jack the Ripper have alleged, a penile fistula (which would have rendered him impotent and therefore, they claim, more likely to be a serial killer of women). Figure 2 The main entrance to the original St Mark's Hospital building in City Road (1853). It expanded several times (the 1926 extension can be seen on the left) before moving to Harrow in 1995. Significantly, in 1854 the infirmary acquired a new name—St Mark's Hospital for Fistula and other Diseases of the Rectum. It was common practice among specialist hospitals to pick a saint's name so as to make fund-raising easier. However, Salmon was insistent that the public should know what went on in the new building by inscribing in the stonework across the front of the building ‘St Mark's Hospital for Fistula &c (The lettering was covered over in the 1990s by the redevelopers, probably to avoid putting off potential residents.) Further expansion in 1896 meant there were now 54 beds, though financial constraints meant that only half could be used. Fund-raising events—dinners, balls, theatre performances (including one organized by Lillie Langtry)—helped. The increasing importance of bowel cancer led to another change of name in 1909 to St Mark's Hospital for Cancer, Fistula &c. In 1926 another wing was built, as was a nurses’ home to help attract and retain nurses. In 1948 the hospital, which Aneurin Bevan called ‘a jewel in his health service’, became part of the NHS and in 1995 it moved to Harrow to be amalgamated with Northwick Park Hospital, where it continues to be the national centre for large bowel diseases. A walk through St Luke's gives you the opportunity to rediscover its lost hospitals. Their fortunes have been mixed: one is still functioning; one has survived though is no longer a hospital; parts of two still exist; but no trace remains of the other three. The highlights of the walk are shown in Box 1.

The lost hospitals of St Luke's

Few Londoners know the whereabouts of St Luke's, yet for much of the 19th century it was home to seven leading hospitals. In 1865 you could have stood on City Road, near the famous Eagle Tavern, and been able to see six of them. But during the 20th century all but one were to vanish. And it was not just the hospitals that disappeared. The district of St Luke's itself became invisible. This may have been the result of a deliberate policy to ‘lose’ one of the poorest, most deprived areas of London. Like St Giles (another area that became invisible), much of the housing stock was dreadful, with overcrowded ‘rookeries’. In the 1850s St Lukes had 245 people per acre, more than St Giles (221), Clerkenwell (170), Westminster (71) or Islington (30). The local Medical Officer of Health described the houses as ‘typhus nests’. Both St Luke's and St Giles were ‘dealt with’ by wholesale redevelopment that left them almost unrecognizable, destroying as it did both their architectural heritage and any sense of community. Box 1 Highlights of the walk Site of the world's first chest hospital (Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest) Remains of one of London's largest workhouse infirmaries (Holborn & Finsbury Poor Law Union) Former home of the leading hospital for bowel disease in the UK (St Mark's Hospital) Site of the earliest voluntary hospital in London (French Huguenot Hospital) One of the leading ophthalmic hospitals in the world (Moorfields Eye Hospital) One of the last surviving public baths and washhouse in London (Ironmonger Row) Site of one of the most spectacular buildings in 19th century London (St Luke's Hospital) Box 2 St Mark's Hospital for Cancer, Fistula &c The instigator, Frederick Salmon, was an ambitious surgeon whose progress and advancement had been obstructed by medical nepotism and corruption. In 1835 he opened what became known as the ‘Fistula Infirmary’ in Aldersgate Street. Many of his subscribers had themselves suffered from lower bowel problems (a common problem at the time given people's diet), including William Copeland, Lord Mayor of London; Charles Dickens, who suffered from anal fistula; and Lord Iveagh of the Guinness brewing empire. By 1838 the infirmary needed more space. It first moved to Charterhouse Square and then in 1854 to a fine new, three storey, Italianate building designed by John Wallen (Figure 2). It had 25 beds for inpatients together with outpatient facilities. One to benefit was the artist, Walter Sickert, whose treatment at St Mark's has been used as evidence that he suffered from an anal fistula and not, as those who believe he was Jack the Ripper have alleged, a penile fistula (which would have rendered him impotent and therefore, they claim, more likely to be a serial killer of women). Figure 2 The main entrance to the original St Mark's Hospital building in City Road (1853). It expanded several times (the 1926 extension can be seen on the left) before moving to Harrow in 1995. Significantly, in 1854 the infirmary acquired a new name—St Mark's Hospital for Fistula and other Diseases of the Rectum. It was common practice among specialist hospitals to pick a saint's name so as to make fund-raising easier. However, Salmon was insistent that the public should know what went on in the new building by inscribing in the stonework across the front of the building ‘St Mark's Hospital for Fistula &c (The lettering was covered over in the 1990s by the redevelopers, probably to avoid putting off potential residents.) Further expansion in 1896 meant there were now 54 beds, though financial constraints meant that only half could be used. Fund-raising events—dinners, balls, theatre performances (including one organized by Lillie Langtry)—helped. The increasing importance of bowel cancer led to another change of name in 1909 to St Mark's Hospital for Cancer, Fistula &c. In 1926 another wing was built, as was a nurses’ home to help attract and retain nurses. In 1948 the hospital, which Aneurin Bevan called ‘a jewel in his health service’, became part of the NHS and in 1995 it moved to Harrow to be amalgamated with Northwick Park Hospital, where it continues to be the national centre for large bowel diseases. A walk through St Luke's gives you the opportunity to rediscover its lost hospitals. Their fortunes have been mixed: one is still functioning; one has survived though is no longer a hospital; parts of two still exist; but no trace remains of the other three. The highlights of the walk are shown in Box 1.

Anglo-Modernism: Gender, Ethnicity and Value

Janet Wolff: AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 2003), 29 b&w illns, 172 pp., hardback ISBN 0-8014-3923-X, £25.95, paperback ISBN 0-8014-8742-0, £11.50. It is now fast becoming conventional to begin books and articles on modernist subjects by acknowledging that the last decade or so has seen an enormous growth in a literature concerned to revise the ‘modernist paradigm’ which is said to have dominated art-historical understanding of twentieth-century art during the century of its birth. Repudiating what we seem communally to think of as the legacy of Clement Greenberg and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, we are looking for other and more inclusive ways of writing the history of ‘modern’ art than they provided. Among the areas of attention that have benefited from such revisionist initiatives, British art has seen a series of strong scholarly attempts to recast the form of our understanding of modern art outside the inherited pattern. Beginning with Charles Harrison's English Art and Modernism (1981) and continuing most recently with Lisa Tickner's Modern Life and Modern Subjects (2000) and the collection The Geographies of Englishness (2002), early twentieth-century British art has been recast as modern in ways that established explanations do not allow, while artists such as C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, or Walter Sickert have been the beneficiaries of growing scholarly literatures. In the United States, exhibitions such as the American Century: Art and Culture show at the Whitney Museum in 1999 have given new attention to the period 1900 to 1950 in American art and begun to give its variety and its non-modernist strands their proper due. There is a new attention to the Ashcan artists and to modern ‘realist’ traditions in the work of art historians such as Rebecca Zurier and Michael Leja, whose recent book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp makes considerable strides in reformulating the narrative of American painting around 1900.

The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The Sisters’ Arts’

The issue of the visual, of the interrelationship between language/literature and painting appears to be central to Woolf’s aesthetic interrogation. She tried to find a satisfying solution to the inter-art dialogue but it was to no avail. She constantly found herself confronted with the wall of what she called the reticence of painting. Her response then was to accumulate words detailing the experience of the reception of the pictorial work. The question of meaning, of making sense of a picture prevented her from envisaging another way of looking at painting, seeing it as an experience, an event, engaging the viewer in another kind of aesthetic intercourse resisting language. The silence and the reticence of painting which, for Woolf, represented a mystery, sent her back to her own activity, to her work and what it was worth via the mirror-image of the sister art.Apart from ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ and ‘Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’, the multiplicity of essays dedicated or referring to painting shows that Woolf was deeply inspired and moved by this art which she thought of in terms of the unreachable and much desired medium, at the same time feeling the need to reassert the superiority of language. This was grounded in a primary experience, that of her relationship to Vanessa and the sharing of the arts between the two sisters on the conversational mode.