Walter Sickert: A Life

Description

The first major life of the outstanding British painter - and Jack the Ripper suspect - Walter Sickert (1860-1942), by the highly acclaimed biographer of Aubrey Beardsley. Walter Richard Sickert is perhaps the outstanding figure of British art during the last hundred years. Many contemporary painters, from Hodgkin and Bacon to Auerbach and Kossof, acknowledge a debt to his influence. His career spanned six decades of unceasing experiment and achievement. As a young artist, he was welcomed and encouraged by Degas. He was the disciple of Whistler and mentor of Beardsley. He founded the London Impressionists and the Camden Town Group. He was taken up by both the Woolfs and the Sitwells. He gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill. His energy was prodigious and his personality fascinating: he was also an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, polemicist, teacher and wit. He relished controversy: his early paintings of London music halls and his late works, based on 18th-century etchings and contemporary news photographs, provoked outraged criticism from conventional commentators. Sturgis also devotes an appendix to charting in detail Sickert's posthumous life as a player in the 'Jack the Ripper' circus, assessing (and demolishing) the arguments of Patricia Cornwell and others in the light of his own discoveries.

Matthew Sturgis is a freelance writer and critic who has written art criticism for Harpers & Queen, travel pieces for the Sunday Telegraph and football reports for the Independent on Sunday. He is the author of Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, praised by David Profumo in the Literary Review as 'deft and intriguing' and by Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times as 'compelling and racy', and the highly praised Aubrey Beardsley. He is married to the gallery owner Rebecca Hossack, and lives in London.

"(Sturgis) clearly has a profound sense of the paradoxes underlying the man and his work!meticulous!heartfelt and thoroughly convincing" TLS "a truly comprehensive, grandsweep biography...detailed, amusing and moving!.brilliantly done!an outstanding achievement!At last Sickert has the biography he deserves" The Spectator "excellent!.authoritative!Sturgis's scholarship ...is exemplary" The Guardian "a fine biography" Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday "a biography that is as sure in its chronicling of artistic movements and trends as in its acute attention to the life of its subject" The Financial Times "as magisterial, taut and fresh!it is a measure of how impressive Sickert's life, career and influence is that it feels more apt to argue that the artist has been fortunate in his biographer" The Independent "the paradox of Sickert's art and of his behaviour, expertly analysed by Sturgis, lies in the contrast between this soiling truth to life and a flamboyantly fictious theatricality!.he has revealed his (Sickert's) idiosyncratic humanity, which is all that a biographer needs to do" The Observer "excellent!.authoritative!Sturgis's scholarship ...is exemplary" The Guardian "outstanding!.such an expansive character deserves expansive treatment and Matthew Sturgis provides it sylishly!!it never flags, information is balanced with anecdote and the confusing turn of the century art world is faultlessly laid out!.Sickert's best-know painting is Ennui it is a mood entirely alien to this wonderfully rich biography" Sunday Telegraph "This immense and scrupulous biography restores Sickert's reputation as a painter!Sturgis has written a proper biography" Daily Telegraph