Sickert In Venice: Walter Sickert's Venetian love
affair
The Godfather of modern British art was transformed in
Italy.
By Lucy Davies, The Telegraph
04.03.09
"Nearly sat on a scorpion in the WC," wrote Walter
Sickert from Venice in 1895, to his friend and fellow artist Philip
Wilson Steer. "Thought of you at once: of what you would say." The
tale of Sickert's sojourn among palaces crumbling in the salty air,
full of penury and adultery, of experimentation and finally
triumph, is the subject of an exhibition this month at Dulwich
Picture Gallery.
Venice was the making of Sickert. He called it "the loveliest
city in the world", remaining not just for a season, but on and off
for 10 years. Every aspect of his later output was foreshadowed in
the work he completed there. Returning to England in 1905, his
reputation as godfather of modern British art, leading younger
painters into the new century, was assured.
Tension and trouble formed the background to his departure. For
several months previously, the trial of Oscar Wilde had dominated
the news, bringing with it a virulent backlash against experimental
artistic expression in any form. In January the 35-year-old artist
had exhibited 49 oils, drawings and etchings at a gallery in Brook
Street. But critics complained his pictures of music halls were "so
dark as to be outshone by their frames". Method that had defined
his originality in the 1880s was met with boredom.
Overtaken by lassitude, his creativity stalled. At the time, his
wife Ellen was drifting through Europe, and he used her absence to
invest his energies in a passionate affair with Ada Leverson, also
married, and one of Wilde's closest supporters. As if things
couldn't get any worse, he had rashly offered space in his studio
to his erstwhile tutor James Whistler, recently returned from
Paris. Whistler's personality made him an amusing but tiresome
guest and they fell out.
In May he gave up and joined Ellen in Italy. One imagines him
full of hope on the train journey there. It is tempting, too, to
think he stopped off in Paris and saw Monet's Rouen Cathedral
series at Durand-Ruel. Certainly he would later praise the
Frenchman for his ability to circumvent repetitiveness, and employ
the same method of dabbing paint to create a pulsating surface.
His relationship with Ellen collapsed the following year but
Venice had pricked his imagination. He took a studio on the top
floor of a building a short walk away from the Accademia and the
church of il Gesuati, both stuffed with the artistic achievements
of previous generations – Titian's altarpieces, works by Tintoretto
and Palma Giovane. He wrote to Steer: "Venice is really first rate
for work… I am getting some things done".
For the first few years, either feeling his way or mindful of
future sales, he stuck to famous buildings like the Rialto and St
Mark's, but treated with his own distinct version of
Impressionism.
"To see the thing all at once," he wrote, again to Steer, "to
work open and loose, freely, with a full brush and full colour."
William Logsdail remembers watching him at the Ponte della Paglia
"caper like a master of fence, backing and lunging with sudden
stabs at the canvas".
The winter of 1903-04 saw terrible weather. He purchased a pair
of fisherman's waders but was eventually forced indoors, only to
discover the breakthrough he had been looking for. No doubt
influenced by Degas and Lautrec, he began a series of ambiguous
figure studies of local working-class women in a boudoir setting.
"From 9-4," he wrote to Jacques Emile Blanche, "it is the
uninterrupted joy of kind, obliging little models, to amuse me with
smutty talk while posing like angels." In dark, grimy interiors,
their features are cursorily treated with broad dashes of paint.
They exude sensuality: perfect practice for his Camden
Town series when he returned to London two years later.
He didn't revisit Venice for another 25 years. In the meantime,
the work he produced there sold well, particularly in Paris. He
wrote that the French capital "happens to have taken to me as a
Venetian painter de bon cote. They are very sentimental
about Venice and dieu merci, rather ignorant, so I impress
them."
When he was elected a Royal Academician in 1934, he chose for
his diploma piece neither a music hall nor a Camden Town
nude. Instead he settled on a canvas of a sparkling Santa Maria
della Salute, painted in 1901. It was an admission, surely, of all
that the city had meant to him and
his art.
- 'Sickert in Venice' is at Dulwich Picture Gallery from Mar 4
until May 31