Walter Richard Sickert - The Trapeze, 1920
(Picture: The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)One of the first things we learn about Walter Sickert in this marvellously comprehensive exhibition is that he was an actor and showman at the start. His artist father Oswald persuaded him of the instability of an artist’s life and so he spent three years as a minor actor attached to Sir Henry Irving’s company.
That early calling materialises in much of his work, not just in his studies of music halls – and there’s never been a richer celebration of that working class haven – but in the sheer drama of light and shade that invests his art. Sickert the failed actor transmutes all the poignant glitter of life in the spotlight into the theatricality of much of his painting. There are spirited depictions of the heroines of the music hall stage – Minnie Cunningham in a blaze of scarlet at the Old Bedford, say – but also of the rapt audience of young men in bowler hats. The male gaze here is intent and transfixed. Indeed he follows the music halls into their later incarnations as picture-houses; he was one of the first to paint people waiting to watch a film. His capacity for playing a role, which all his acquaintance observed, served him well in the mutations of his self-portraits.
