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拍品专文
Paintings of nudes in sinister north London lodgings – to many the quintessential Sickert - formed part of the artist’s vocabulary for less than a decade. On his return to London in 1905 after six years based in France, Sickert campaigned in print and on canvas to rid British art of its hypocritical puritanism. Not only did he refuse to invent implausible situations to lend his nudes respectability, he deliberately encouraged squalid, if ambiguous, interpretations. Sickert seldom painted the nude after the outbreak of war in 1914 when real life provided artists with subjects more disturbing than any Camden Town interior.
Because of the relatively small number of nude subjects painted by Sickert, each has special interest. The present work belongs to an interrelated sequence of drawings and paintings of the nude lying on a metal bedstead at 6 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town. It can be accurately dated between May and August 1907, one of the most creative periods of Sickert’s life. In May, he rented the first floor rooms above his Mornington Crescent lodgings to use as an alternative studio, telling a friend: ‘I have got entangled in a batch of a dozen or so interiors on the first floor here. A typical lodgings first-floor. …I should so like to show you a set of Studies of illumination half-done. ... A little Jewish girl …& a nude alternate days’. In August, later than usual, he left London for his usual summer in Dieppe.
Eleven paintings are known to me from the set of ‘a dozen or so’ interiors, five of the little Jewish girl and six of the nude. The first floor at 6 Mornington Crescent consisted of two intercommunicating rooms with wooden doors between them. In his paintings of the nude Sickert kept these doors open, set the bed parallel to the picture plane in the front room and viewed the scene from the back room. The window was fitted with a Venetian blind. The furnishings at Sickert’s disposal were a metal bedstead; a chest of drawers on which stood an oval dressing-mirror; and a chair by the head of the bed on which the model’s clothes were strewn. Two of the six paintings show the model seated on the bed (one, Petit Matin, is known only from a photograph). In four she is lying down with her head to the right of the picture; in three of these she is asleep. Sickert’s description of the paintings as ‘Studies in illumination’ pinpoints their inspiration. Light is his principal subject; the figure is its vehicle. Sunlight pours through the uncovered window in two paintings of the nude reclining (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), to allow Sickert to create classic, complex contrejour studies.
The present work and a closely-related version (University of Hull) reverse these effects. The window is now covered by the Venetian blind, but within this well of darkness light floods onto the sleeping body from an unseen source in front of the picture. The sense that we are invading the woman’s privacy is mitigated by the objectivity with which Sickert treats the figure as a still-life composed of simplified geometrical shapes: the stomach is a dome, the torso a cylinder, the breasts are spheres. The figure is contained within a contour which bounds over the swell of the breast, dips at the waist, before rising again to follow the full curve of the thigh. The face is a cipher. These two paintings are studies in darkness, but not black darkness. Jewel colours accent the gloom: turquoise to articulate the slats of the blind, a lilac blue the shadows in the bedclothes, deep plum and crimson in the wooden shutters and curtains. The present work was exhibited in 1929 at the Leicester Galleries under the title Night.
We are very grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for preparing this catalogue entry.
Because of the relatively small number of nude subjects painted by Sickert, each has special interest. The present work belongs to an interrelated sequence of drawings and paintings of the nude lying on a metal bedstead at 6 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town. It can be accurately dated between May and August 1907, one of the most creative periods of Sickert’s life. In May, he rented the first floor rooms above his Mornington Crescent lodgings to use as an alternative studio, telling a friend: ‘I have got entangled in a batch of a dozen or so interiors on the first floor here. A typical lodgings first-floor. …I should so like to show you a set of Studies of illumination half-done. ... A little Jewish girl …& a nude alternate days’. In August, later than usual, he left London for his usual summer in Dieppe.
Eleven paintings are known to me from the set of ‘a dozen or so’ interiors, five of the little Jewish girl and six of the nude. The first floor at 6 Mornington Crescent consisted of two intercommunicating rooms with wooden doors between them. In his paintings of the nude Sickert kept these doors open, set the bed parallel to the picture plane in the front room and viewed the scene from the back room. The window was fitted with a Venetian blind. The furnishings at Sickert’s disposal were a metal bedstead; a chest of drawers on which stood an oval dressing-mirror; and a chair by the head of the bed on which the model’s clothes were strewn. Two of the six paintings show the model seated on the bed (one, Petit Matin, is known only from a photograph). In four she is lying down with her head to the right of the picture; in three of these she is asleep. Sickert’s description of the paintings as ‘Studies in illumination’ pinpoints their inspiration. Light is his principal subject; the figure is its vehicle. Sunlight pours through the uncovered window in two paintings of the nude reclining (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), to allow Sickert to create classic, complex contrejour studies.
The present work and a closely-related version (University of Hull) reverse these effects. The window is now covered by the Venetian blind, but within this well of darkness light floods onto the sleeping body from an unseen source in front of the picture. The sense that we are invading the woman’s privacy is mitigated by the objectivity with which Sickert treats the figure as a still-life composed of simplified geometrical shapes: the stomach is a dome, the torso a cylinder, the breasts are spheres. The figure is contained within a contour which bounds over the swell of the breast, dips at the waist, before rising again to follow the full curve of the thigh. The face is a cipher. These two paintings are studies in darkness, but not black darkness. Jewel colours accent the gloom: turquoise to articulate the slats of the blind, a lilac blue the shadows in the bedclothes, deep plum and crimson in the wooden shutters and curtains. The present work was exhibited in 1929 at the Leicester Galleries under the title Night.
We are very grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for preparing this catalogue entry.