Walter Sickert: A Life - Softcover

Sturgis, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007205279 ISBN 13: 9780007205271

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016

Synopsis

The first major life of the outstanding British painter – and Jack the Ripper suspect – Walter Sickert (1860-1942), by the highly acclaimed biographer of Aubrey Beardsley.

Walter Richard Sickert is perhaps the outstanding figure of British art during the last hundred years. Many contemporary painters, from Hodgkin and Bacon to Auerbach and Kossof, acknowledge a debt to his influence. His career spanned six decades of unceasing experiment and achievement. As a young artist, he was welcomed and encouraged by Degas. He was the disciple of Whistler and mentor of Beardsley. He founded the London Impressionists and the Camden Town Group. He was taken up by both the Woolfs and the Sitwells. He gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill.

His energy was prodigious and his personality fascinating: he was also an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, polemicist, teacher and wit. He relished controversy: his early paintings of London music halls and his late works, based on 18th-century etchings and contemporary news photographs, provoked outraged criticism from conventional commentators.

Sturgis also devotes an appendix to charting in detail Sickert's posthumous life as a player in the 'Jack the Ripper' circus, assessing (and demolishing) the arguments of Patricia Cornwell and others in the light of his own discoveries.

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew Sturgis is a freelance writer and critic who has written art criticism for Harpers & Queen, travel pieces for the Sunday Telegraph and football reports for the Independent on Sunday. He is the author of Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, praised by David Profumo in the Literary Review as ‘deft and intriguing’ and by Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times as ‘compelling and racy’, and the highly-praised Aubrey Beardsley. He is married to the gallery owner Rebecca Hossack, and lives in London.

From Booklist:

Sturgis proved to be an exceptional artist's biographer in Aubrey Beardsley (1999), and he now presents a substantial but ever-lively life of the questing British painter Sickert (1860-1942), whom Sturgis succinctly describes as "a great man and a great artist." Charming and mischievous, Sickert enjoyed a happy childhood, a stint as an actor that inspired his scandalous music-hall paintings, and marriage to a woman willing to support him even after they divorced because of his many affairs. Sickert's notorious sexual escapades run the gamut from romantic to pragmatic to farcical. Profoundly inspired by James McNeil Whistler and Degas, Sickert became a leader among radical British painters, an influential art critic, and a teacher. Sturgis' glowing portrait stands in stark opposition to crime writer Patricia Cornwell's extravagant claim in Portrait of a Killer (2002) that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Indeed, Sturgis makes short work of Cornwell's allegations after fully substantiating his portrait of Sickert as a revered artist whose joie de vivre, "rare power of objective vision," frankness, and intensity revitalized the British figurative tradition. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0007205279
• ISBN 13: 9780007205271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 784