Word: sickerts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Chartwell country estate years ago, Winston Churchill was deploring a picture that Art Patron Eddie Marsh had persuaded Mrs. Churchill to buy. Said Painter Walter Sickert, who was visiting Churchill: "Our little friend Eddie is not without a certain idiot flair." Last week, four months after Edward Howard Marsh died at the age of 80, a London gallery displayed the pick of the pictures he had collected for himself over the years, and the critics came to a kinder conclusion: "A great midwife of the arts...
While such unconventional friends as Augustus John and Walter Sickert painted and blustered their way to colorful international reputations, Steer retired more & more into the quiet life of a successful painter-teacher. Hating anything that smacked of "artiness," he wore stiff three-inch collars, dressed in Savile Row suits, ordered his life as rigidly as a banker's clerk. "Painting," he said, "is a job like any other, something one has to do between meals...
...Style. Sickert himself kept on bubbling until the age of 82. At 72 he caused a sensation by exhibiting a portrait of George V painted from a photograph of the king in bowler and overcoat, pointing up the resemblance of the monarch to his bearded horse-trainer. At 74 he was made a Royal Academician, huffily resigned the following year because other Academy members failed to come to the defense of controversial Sculptor Jacob Epstein. In his last years, he changed his signature (from Walter to his middle name, Richard, because it seemed more euphonious), grew a sprawling beard...
...Sickert liked to paint people in action. "Start with a piece of furniture-a table, a chair or a bed. Relate your figures to this setting and let us have them doing something-making love, quarreling, misconducting themselves-as you please-but doing something." His aim was to catch his subject unaware, "before the fizziness in his momentary mood becomes still and flat." The fizz is still in Sickert's best paintings: his nudes resting on the rumpled bed of his dingy studio, the Sunday afternoon dejection of the middleaged, parlor-bound couple in Ennui, the ironic, over...
Until his death in 1942, he resisted all attempts by reverent younger artists to pigeonhole him as Britain's "grand old man of painting." At one of his last shows, he stood in front of an early work, exclaimed, "That's not a Sickert! It's much too good for a Sickert...