It would be hard to imagine a more sinister sequence of self-portraits than those lurking at the start of this riveting Walter Sickert survey at Tate Britain. The artist paints himself glowering in a miasma of shadows, one eye homing in on you like a target. He hovers menacingly behind a bust of a bare-knuckle boxer. He is a grizzled Lazarus attacking his first posthumous meal, a man in a bowler hat tipped at an angle to match his barbed and sarcastic glare. Or he is a single arm, barring the way between a nude model and what might be us – or, more frighteningly, the exit.
This is how Sickert (1860-1942) wished to be seen and known: as a man who must never be taken for granted, a disrupter, an actor, a menace, a taunt.
