Sickert, Walter Richard

1860

1942

Sickert was born in Munich, the son of a Danish painter who subsequently took British nationality. The family moved to England when Sickert was eight, and he was educated in London. He had a short spell on the stage, working for Sir Henry Irving and Dame Madge Kendal, but soon gave it up for his true vocation as a painter. At 21 he attended the Slade School of Fine Art under Alphonse Legros, leaving to work with James McNeil Whistler in the latter’s Tite Street studio. Sickert’s paintings were also influenced by the work of Degas and by that of the French Impressionists. Sickert was a member of the New English Art Club and later the Camden Town Group, both of which wanted to break away from High Victorian art and to seek greater influence from Continental ideas. Sickert retained his interest in the theatre throughout his life, as witnessed by his early little Whistlerian panel of William Penley in Brandon Thomas’s “Charley’s Aunt” and his late image of Nigel Playfair as Tony Lumpkin in Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer”.