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Walter Richard Sickert (31 May 186022 January 1942), born in Munich, Germany, was a painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century. Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His oeuvre also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. ==Training and early career== Sickert was the eldest son of Oswald Sickert, a Danish-German artist, and his wife, Eleanor Louisa Henry, who was an illegitimate daughter of the British astronomer Richard Sheepshanks.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 33.〕 In 1868, the family left Munich to settle in Britain, 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 young Sickert was sent to University College School from 1870–1871, 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 and etching assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 34.〕 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. He developed a personal version of Impressionism, favouring sombre colouration. Following Degas' advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from "the tyranny of nature".〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 57.〕 In 1888 Sickert joined the New English Art Club, a group of French-influenced realist artists. Sickert's first major works, dating from the late 1880s, were portrayals of scenes in London music halls. One of the two paintings he exhibited at the NEAC in April 1888, ''Katie Lawrence at Gatti's'', which portrayed a well known music hall singer of the era, incited controversy "more heated than any other surrounding an English painting in the late 19th century".〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 15-17〕 Sickert's rendering was denounced as ugly and vulgar, and his choice of subject matter was deplored as too tawdry for art, as female performers were popularly viewed as morally akin to prostitutes.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 15〕 The painting announced what would be Sickert's recurring interest in sexually provocative themes. In the late 1880s, Sickert spent much of his time in France, especially in Dieppe, which he first visited in mid-1885, and where his mistress, and possibly his illegitimate son, lived. During this period Sickert began writing art criticism for various publications. Between 1894 and 1904 Sickert made a series of visits to Venice, initially focussing on the city's topography; it was during his last painting trip in 1903–04 that, forced indoors by inclement weather, he developed a distinctive approach to the multiple figure tableau that he further explored on his return to Britain.〔Upstone, 2009, p. 9-11〕 The models for many of the Venetian paintings are believed to have been prostitutes, with whom Sickert may have had physical relations.〔Upstone 2009, p. 47〕 Sickert's fascination with urban culture accounted for his acquisition of studios in working-class sections of London, first in Cumberland Market in the 1890s, then in Camden Town in 1905.〔Upstone 2009, p. 39〕 The latter location provided an event that would secure Sickert's prominence in the realist movement in Britain.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 153〕 On 11 September 1907, Emily Dimmock, a prostitute cheating on her partner, was murdered in her home at Agar Grove (then St Paul's Road), Camden. After sexual intercourse the man had slit her throat open while she was asleep, then left in the morning.〔 The "Camden Town murder" became an ongoing source of prurient sensationalism in the press.〔 For several years Sickert had already been painting lugubrious female nudes on beds, and continued to do so, deliberately challenging the conventional approach to life painting—"The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name of 'the nude' represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy"—giving four of them, which included a male figure, the title, ''The Camden Town Murder'', and causing a controversy which ensured attention for his work.〔 These paintings do not show violence, however, but a sad thoughtfulness, explained by the fact that three of them were originally exhibited with completely different titles, one more appropriately being ''What Shall We Do for the Rent?'', and the first in the series, ''Summer Afternoon''.〔 While the painterly handling of the works inspired comparison to Impressionism, and the emotional tone suggested a narrative more akin to genre painting, specifically Degas's ''Interior'',〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 208.〕 the documentary realism of the ''Camden Town'' paintings was without precedent in British art.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 213.〕 These and other works were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range. Sickert's best known work, ''Ennui'' (c. 1913), reveals his interest in Victorian narrative genres. The composition, which exists in at least five painted versions and was also made into an etching, depicts a couple in a dingy interior gazing abstractedly into empty space, as though they can no longer communicate with each other. Just before World War I he championed the avant-garde artists Lucien Pissarro, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. At the same time he founded, with other artists, the Camden Town Group of British painters, named from the district of London in which he lived. This group had been meeting informally since 1905, but was officially established in 1911. It was influenced by Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, but concentrated on scenes of often drab suburban life; Sickert himself said he preferred the kitchen to the drawing room as a scene for paintings.〔Baron et al. 1992, p. 156.〕 From 1908–1912 and again from 1915–1918, Sickert was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art, where David Bomberg was one of his students. He also briefly set up an art school in Manchester where his students included Harry Rutherford. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Walter Sickert」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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