When you think of Walter Sickert you are probably thinking of his Camden Town series. Turbid interiors with grey-browns, umbers and blacks enlivened by the fall of light on exposed flesh. The flesh tending to be that of local prostitutes who posed for Sickert in low-lit low rent rooms. There always seems a weight to the atmosphere in Sickert paintings.
In the Venice paintings at the Dulwich Picture gallery there is a clear sense of Sickert working at painting. The stuff of painting: colour, composition, paint handling, texture. This is something I like to see. It always reminds me of Cezanne. Sickert paintings tend to be dark. He favours purple browns, muted greens, grey blacks. These tonal colours work well for night-time scenes where a mood of melancholy or incompleteness is created. There is one big painting of St Marks where the sky is a luminous acidic green which works brilliantly against the purple browns of the facade.
Paintings from later trips to Venice in 1903 focus on interiors-predominately women in interiors. These can be seen to predict the mood of the later Camden Town paintings. I liked the intimate scale of these paintings. They encourage close looking and seem to compress the interior atmosphere even more. The paint was applied swiftly and with energy giving an overall immediacy to the painting.
As a big fan of Frank Auerbach it was interesting to see the lineage of drawing going back to Sickert. The working practices of Auerbach being to make paintings from drawings made in the landscape rather than working directly in front of the subject.
