Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer: the many faces of Walter Sickert

‘It’s too dark and life is too short,’ was Walter Sickert’s explanation of his decision to leave London in 1898. Separated from his first wife Ellen Cobden and in financial trouble, he did a flit across the Channel to Dieppe.

A magnet for artists in the summer season, the town had long been a popular subject for tourist views. ‘I see my line…’ he wrote soon after his arrival. ‘Picturesque work. This place Dieppe, is my only up to now, goldmine.’ The place had already had a transformative effect on his painting. It was while spending the summer there with his mentor Whistler in 1885 that he had shifted artistic allegiance to Degas, whom he had first met two years earlier in Paris while delivering Whistler’s portrait of his mother to the Salon. Under Degas’s influence, Sickert ditched the tonal alla prima technique he had learned from Whistler for the Frenchman’s more considered method combining preliminary drawing with strong colour. It brought the sun out on his dingy street scenes, making them saleable to French collectors; his views of Dieppe and Venice, to which he made several trips, won him exhibitions with Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. He would later describe the process of painting these nice little earners as ‘chewing… old cud’. He had by then moved in with the redheaded belle of the fishmarket, Augustine Villain, and her brood of children by different fathers. ‘It is bloody healthy here and fucking cheap,’ he confided to William Rothenstein a couple of years later, adding in brackets: ‘“Fucking” here used as an adverb, not as a substantival gerund.’

In London, Degas’s example opened the door to a subject closer to his heart: the stage. Greasepaint was in Sickert’s blood. His maternal grandmother had danced at the Princess in Shoreditch and he had trod the boards in minor roles for four years before enrolling at the Slade in 1881.