SICKERT, WALTER RICHARD

born May 31, 1860, Munich, Bavaria [now in Germany] died Jan. 22, 1942, Bath, Somerset, Eng. painter and printmaker who was the most important of the British Impressionists. Sickert was the son of Oswald Adalbert Sickert, a Danish-born German draftsman who settled in England in 1868. After several years on the stage, Sickert went in 1881 to the Slade School in London. In 1882 he became a pupil of James McNeill Whistler, and in 1883 he met Edgar Degas in Paris; these artists much influenced his work and personality. His first pictures of London music-hall interiors, which became one of his most typical subjects, appeared in 1886 at the New English Art Club, where Sickert exhibited until 1917. Sickert was indebted to Degas for the ability to establish a situation merely by the attitudes of the figures. He coupled this with a refreshing vein of satire, as in Ennui (c. 1913). Between 1885 and 1905 Sickert spent most of his summers at Dieppe and worked in Venice. Returning to London in 1905, he became the focus of a group of painters that included Augustus John and Lucien Pissarro, the son of the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Through contact with Pissarro, Sickert began to show the influence of Neo-Impressionism in his work. He was a founder of the Camden Town and London groups (1911 and 1913, respectively). Sickert painted at Brighton and Bath in the 1920s and '30s and wrote occasional criticism, supporting Degas's principles of drawing.