Walter Sickert

English artist. Sickert was born in Munich, the eldest son of the Danish painter Oswald Adalbert Sickert. The family moved to London in 1868. After a short period as an actor, Sickert studied art at the Slade School and then under James Whistler in Chelsea when, like Whistler, he took to etching.

In 1883 he met Degas in Paris, who became the greatest influence on his style and attitude to art. Though often described as an Impressionist, he was only so to the same limited extent as Degas, constructing pictures from swift notes made on the spot, and never painting in the open air. His later work became broader in treatment and lighter in tone, a late innovation being the Echoes', in which he freely adapted the work of Victorian illustrators.

He worked in Dieppe from 1885 to 1905, with occasional visits to Venice, and produced music-hall paintings and views of Venice and Dieppe in dark, rich tones.

While living with her family in Dieppe, France in 1899, 14 year old Clementine Ogilvy met and became infatuated with the much-older Sickert, describing him to her daughter years later as the most-handsome and compelling man she had ever met. Clementine Ogilvy became Clementine Churchill upon her marriage to Winston Churchill in 1908.

Ennui (about 1913; Tate Gallery, London) is a typical interior painting.

Although well known in Europe, he did not achieve recognition in the UK until the 1920s.

His writings were collected in 1947 under the title A Free House. His works, broadly Impressionist in style, capture subtleties of tone and light, often with a melancholic atmosphere, their most familiar subjects being the rather shabby cityscapes and domestic and music-hall interiors of late Victorian and Edwardian London.