Sickert in Dieppe
[ Exhibition )
Walter Sickert, L’Hotel Royal, Dieppe, 1894, oil on canvas, 50.2 x 61 cm, Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield
How did the French seaside town of Dieppe influence one of the greatest British 20th century painters?
Walter Sickert (1860-1942) had a vivid interest in everyday life in Dieppe, to which he was a regular visitor for over four decades and a permanent resident from 1898-1905.
Through over 80 paintings, prints, preparatory drawings and etchings, this exhibition revealed Sickert’s breadth of subject matter – the town’s architecture, harbour and fishing quarter, shops, café culture and inhabitants – whilst charting the development of his pictorial technique during this period.
It showed the importance of the personal and professional relationships he made in Dieppe, including European artists such as Degas, Whistler and the Impressionists.
Find out more about Sickert’s time in Dieppe in our blog by exhibition curator Katy Norris.
What the press said
This exhibition celebrates Dieppe and its surroundings as well as the coming to maturity of a great painter. Here, in the dialogue between architecture and light [in the St Jacques series], there is a magnificence, as well as a melancholy, and their recurrence in this exhibition makes it a triumph.
Frances Spalding, Mail on Sunday
This show is both social history – a panorama of the Normandy resort at the fin de siècle – and an exploration of Sickert’s hybrid painting styles, combining everyday pictorial detail learnt from Degas with unsettling atmospheric effects influences by Whistler’s pictorial detail.
Jackie Wullschlager, FT Life & Arts
This exhibition was made possible by a number of generous organisations and individuals
Want to know more?
If you’re conducting research into this artist or another aspect of Modern British art and would like to use our library and archive, please contact Sarah Norris, Collections Manager on s.norris@pallant.org.uk.