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School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk

Display artist/maker:

Walter Richard Sickert

Born: 1860, Germany, Munich Died: 1942, Bathampton, UK

Painter, printmaker, teacher and writer. His family came to live in London at the time of the Great Exhibition. Despite showing early artistic promise, he wanted to be an actor. This was unsuccessful, and he entered the Slade School of Art, eventually becoming assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler, signing his early works”pupil of Whistler”. Sickert met Edgar Degas on a trip to Paris, which greatly affected him and he began to paint in an Impressionistic but drab style, using drawings and memory to paint scenes of music hall interiors where spatial realtionships are ambiguous. From this period on, he lived between London, France and Venice. Exhibiting at the New English Art Club, he championed other avante-garde artists such as Lucien Pissarro, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. In 1911 he founded the Camden Town Group, incorporating 16 artists who had been meeting informally in his studio since 1905. The group concentrated on painting scenes of sombre everyday life, exhibiting at the Carfax gallery. Sickert was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art in the years 1908-1912, and ran several other private schools. Later in his career he experimented more adapting Victorian illustrations and news photographs to produce ’poster’ style paintings, or enlarging elements out of context, in a way that precedes Pop Art. He became a member of the Royal Academy in 1934, but resigned in 1935.