Camden New Journal - Feature: Walter Sickert’s paintings at the Courtauld Gallery

Publications by New Journal Enterprises

Home

Archive

Competition

The Review - FEATURE
Published: 18 October 2007

Le Lit de Fer (The Iron Bed), 1905. Pastel on buff paper

The naked and the dead

Walter Sickert’s paintings inspired by the murder of a prostitute are on display together for the first time in a new exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, along with his famous studies Camden Town nudes

WALTER Sickert did not mince his words. He had been living on the continent – Venice and Dieppe – and when the artist returned to London in 1905, he was shocked by the standards of his British contemporaries.
In the 1880s and 1890s he had been a key member of the New English Art Club, which promoted modern painting such as Impressionism and batted away the structures and strictures of the Victorian art world.
But his time abroad had weakened the resolve of his fellow members of the NEAC, and he was ready to tell them what he thought was wrong with the early Edwardian styles that he saw
around him.
He called his one-time friend Philip Wilson Steer “fat as a retired grocer” and called another contemporary, Fred Brown, who was teaching with Steer at the Slade, a “dry old stick”.
He laid into exhibitions at the Royal Academy and Paris Salon, dubbing nudes on show there as “obscene monsters” – a brave condemnation of fellow artists’ works, the leading institutes that displayed them and the patrons who would buy them.
He was to write: “The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name nude represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy.”
Sickert’s criticisms of those around him can be justified by his own astonishing output of the period.
He fought to recapture the nude from those he felt were unable to represent the human form in all its grotesque glory. This earned him a reputation of being a sordid painter – he was fascinated with the edgy side of Edwardian life, and was attracted to Camden Town for its proliferation of brothels, rundown pubs and cheap lodgings that were the homes of a large under- class.
Then events playing out in front off him provided the perfect copy. In 1907, the murder of prostitute Emily Dimmock in a seedy Camden Town bedsit captured the public’s imagination.
Sickert used her death as the basis for four works, dubbed the Camden Town murder series. They are now being shown together for the first time in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, along with 25 other Sickert works.

• Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes runs from October 25 to January 20 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2.
Tel:020 7848 2777
10am-6pm daily. Last admission 5.30
www.courtauld.ac.uk

• For a fuller account of Sickert and the murder of Emily Dimmock, CLICK HERE

Comment on this article.
(You must supply your full name and email address for your comment to be published)

Name:

Email:

Comment:

» Exhibition Listings
» Exhibition Tickets