I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of Walter Sickert. (Tate Britain, London until 18 September.)

Over a six-decade career, Sickert painted enigmatic self-portraits, beautifully lit street scenes and grim nudes. He distilled on canvas the magic of the music halls, the majesty of Venetian architecture and the melancholy of everyday domestic dramas. He was a key figure in the modernising of British art, importing avant-garde techniques from France and introducing gritty realism. And he kept experimenting, even in later life.

'The artist is he who can take something ordinary and wring out of it attar of roses.'

I was particularly struck by Sickert’s paintings of Victorian music halls.

There were over 300 music halls in London in the late nineteenth century. They put on performances by singers, dancers, acrobats and comedians. These were raucous, rowdy venues, melting pots of character and class. 

The son of a Danish artist, Sickert was born in Munich in 1860 and grew up in London. His English mother was musical, his grandmother had been a performer at the Princess in Shoreditch, and from a young age he was described as ‘stage struck.’ When he left school at 18 he sought work as an actor and appeared in a number of minor theatrical roles before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in 1881.

'To justify our likes and dislikes, we generally say that the work we dislike is not serious.’

Sickert visited a music hall nearly every night, making discrete sketches of audiences, artists and architecture. Inspired by Degas’s pictures of Parisian café-concerts, he set his work at Gatti’s in Hungerford and Sam Collins’s on Islington Green. And his favourite location was the Bedford in Camden, an intimate venue entered through a narrow alleyway.

Sickert painted the view of the stage from the orchestra pit; the interplay between audience and performer; the large mirrors, elaborate plasterwork and gilded ornaments. He explored complex angles and perspectives, distinctive gestures and reflections. Here we see a claque of fans, mouths agape, in awe of their heroine. Here are the Sisters Lloyd in elegant lace gowns, Minnie Cunningham all aglow in a bright red dress and hat. And Little Dot Hetherington, alone in the spotlight, pointing up at the boys in the gallery. They lean forward, peering through the grate, lost in their own private reveries. 

'The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me.
There he is, can't you see, waving his handkerchief,
As merry as a robin that sings on a tree.’
'The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’ (G Ware)

Sickert was criticised at the time for choosing commonplace, tawdry subjects. But he was committed to representing the drama of contemporary life.

‘We don’t go back to other days, our history is of today.’

Sickert took his enthusiasm for the theatrical beyond the music halls. He made a display of Easter bonnets at Dawsons’ Department Store look like a stage set.  He suggested that the baccarat players at the casino in Dieppe were enacting a tragic scene. 

'I am the only one who will make any money in this room.'

In 1915 Sickert painted red-suited Pierrots performing on Brighton Beach. It’s a rather sad sight. Do the empty deckchairs call to mind the absent soldiers fighting across the channel?  

Sickert often used the titles of his pictures to suggest narratives. 

A whiskered fellow takes a puff on his cigar as his wife stares disconsolately at the wall. The picture is called ‘Ennui,’ and to press home the theme of a troubled marriage, there’s a bell jar on the sideboard containing stuffed birds. A man turns away from his seated wife and makes for the door. He’s ‘Off to the Pub.’

'It is said that we are a great literary nation, but we really don’t care about literature. We like films and we like a good murder.’

Sometimes Sickert clearly wanted to toy with the viewer’s imagination.

A clothed man sits in a claustrophobic room, on an iron-framed bed, his head down, his hands clasped. Beside him is the naked figure of a woman, turned away from us. The picture was first titled ‘The Camden Town Murder,’ referring to an actual event of 1907. But the artist subsequently retitled the work: ‘What Shall We Do for the Rent?’ What’s he up to here? Are we witnesses to a scene of financial desperation, or to a hideous crime?

'Pictures, like streets and persons, have to have names to distinguish them. But their names are not definitions of them, or, indeed, anything but the loosest kind of labels.'

Perhaps Sickert was still at heart an actor, revelling in role-playing and ambiguity.

'Never believe what an artist says, only what he does.'

In the 1930s Sickert used black and white newspaper photos as visual references for paintings of dramatic events. 

Reporters huddle in the rain to greet the arrival of Emilia Earhart after her solo crossing of the Atlantic. King Edward VIII steps purposefully from his limousine, a busby held protectively in front of him. A miner released from a lengthy underground strike kisses his wife with gusto.

'That picture gives you the right feeling, doesn’t it?'

Although this was late in his career, Sickert was alert to new possibilities. He recognised the spontaneity of the snap-shot; the power of the camera to capture the fleeting moment. His use of photography is quite extraordinary, foreshadowing Warhol, Bacon and Richter. 

'Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it.'

Throughout his long career Sickert consistently shone a revealing spotlight on small but significant events and moments; gestures and relationships. Though he remained a mysterious figure, he taught us a great deal: to see drama in the everyday; to elevate the ordinary; to amplify truth.

‘The most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and poetry which [artists] daily see around them.’

’Now I never was a one to go and stint myself.
Cos if I like a thing, I like it, that's enough.
But there's lots of people say that if you like a thing a lot,
It'll grow on you and all that sort of stuff.
Now I like my drop of stout as well as anyone,
Although stout you know is supposed to make you fat,
And there's many a lar-di-dar-di madam wouldn't dare to touch it.
'Cos she mustn't spoil her figure, silly cat.
I always hold in having it if you fancy it.
If you fancy it, that's understood,
And suppose it makes you fat?
I don't worry over that.
A little of what you fancy does you good.’
'A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good’ (G Arthurs, F Leigh)

No. 381