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Concept
Walter Sickert
Summary
Walter Richard Sickert (31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942) was a Bavarian-born British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the mid and late 20th century.
Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His work includes portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. Decades after his death, several researchers and theorists suspected Sickert to have been the London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, but the theory has largely been dismissed.
Sickert was born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria, on 31 May 1860, the eldest son of Oswald Sickert, a Danish artist, and his English wife, Eleanor Louisa Henry, who was the illegitimate daughter of the astronomer Richard Sheepshanks. In 1868, following the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, the family settled in England, where Oswald's work had been recommended by Freiherrin Rebecca von Kreusser to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery at the time. The family eventually settled in London and obtained British nationality. The young Sickert was sent to University College School from 1870 to 1871, before transferring to King's College School, where he studied until the age of 18. Though he was the son and grandson of painters, he first sought a career as an actor; he appeared in small parts in Sir Henry Irving's company, before taking up the study of art in 1881. After less than a year's attendance at the Slade School, Sickert left to become a pupil of and etching assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Sickert's earliest paintings were small tonal studies painted alla prima from nature after Whistler's example.
In 1883 he travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas, whose use of pictorial space and emphasis on drawing would have a powerful effect on Sickert's work.
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