Walter Sickert, “Bathers at Dieppe”, 1902, Oil on Canvas, 131 x 104 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England
Walter Richard Sickert was a British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionists in London. His work influenced the British styles of the avant-garde art in the mid to late 1900s. A cosmopolitan eccentric, Sickert favored ordinary people and urban scenes as the subjects of his work. He is considered an promintent figure in the transition into Modernism.
In the beginning, Sickert painted in Whistler’s style of rapid, wet-in-wet execution with very fluid paint. He later adopted a more deliberate process of painting pictures in multiple stages. Sickert preferred to paint from drawings, photographs, or popular prints by Victorian illustrators rather than from nature. After transferring the desgn to the canvas by a grid, he made a rapid underpainting using two colors, which dried before applying the final colors.
One of the two paintings Sickert presented in April of 1888 at the New English Art Club, a group of French-indluence realist artists, was “Katie Lawrence at Gatti’s”, a portrait of the well known music hall singer of that era. The rendering was denounced as ugly and vulgar, the subject matter too tawdy for art, as female performers were viewed as morally destitute. This painting was the beginning of Sickert’s recurring interest in sexually provocative themes for some of his work.